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Ethereum Has Issues

blog.dshr.org

211–220 of 377 posts

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#211
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if anyone talking here has every made any kind of insurance claim? Doing it with a smart contract is as feasible as dating a smart contract. You can only really “insure” against globally agreed on data, for example the price of wheat. That is an options/futures market not insurance though.

Nexus Mutual offers insurance against smart contract hacks, coin depegs, custodial provider withdrawal issues, etc, and they've been operating fine for several years. The one advantage I really appreciate is the transparency it enables over the decision making process.

There's no reason this couldn't be expanded for other use cases, including home, car, etc. It really isn't limited to just smart contract data as you suggested.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#212
post #65

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"So much of Crytpo can be explained by Bitcoin FOMO. Everyone just jumps on the latest shitcoin or NFT because "I'm not missing out this time". This 200%

I think this is true. I also think the flipside of the coin is true. So much of the crypto hate can be explained by jealousy and anger at missing out.

True. Bitcoin was once in a multi generation innovation.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#213

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Safety? Customer support? Really? What do you do if you're scammed on the darknet? Let me guess --- nothing because you can't identify who you're dealing with or where they are located.

Yes? The quality of products is millions of times higher than in the streets. Everything gets continually tested by a lot of people. Entire forums dedicated to weed out bad sellers and identity good products .. Yeah, sellers are usually super responsive and will normally fix any issue if you are polite and abide by the rules. Ummm what exactly do you do if you are scammed in real life? Go to the police and file a com…

What amount of money are we talking about? 10k,100k, 1m?

Zero. Lot of lawyers searching for clients with a legitimate legal case. They get a portion of what they win.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#214

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Pure bovine excrement. Scammers can change their identity at will on the darknet.

Trustworthy vendors rely on their reputation. They usually value it a lot. So what if they do? They have to start again from 0 (usually).Its also very easy to avoid them...

Scammers only care about ripping you off. And the darknet is the ideal environment for them.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question here is not whether one can design a market that prevents bad behavior, but whether any of the major players will ever bother using it. If the “little guy” is always on the losing end of market shenanigans, then market makers will never have an incentive to move their liquidity to the “fair” market.

The "little guy" is always at a disadvantage in capitalism (or small business, or mom & pop shop) I suspect there's a disconnect between people talking about democratization of access, and people pointing out crypto doesn't actually make things fair. Crypto doesn't make things fair for the little guy. It does add additional transparency to financial markets though, as well as things like open, verifiable, non-custodi…

>It does add additional transparency to financial markets though

No, not really. This comment is more crypto myth-building. There's nothing technical about blockchains that adds transparency. Any company that wants to publish all its financial statements publicly can technically already do so and could always do so. They don't for many reasons, the most important ones being that customers overwhelmingly want financial privacy, and financial companies are required by law to provide a certain level of privacy for customers.

>open, verifiable, non-custodial, programmable financial contracts

No, smart contracts are technically not "contracts" in the legal sense and are also not "non-custodial" because they require middlemen to run the blockchain. There is also nothing more open or verifiable about smart contracts compared to any other program. They're just programs. I absolutely hate that they used the name "smart contract" for this because it's so misleading.

>as long as all the inputs can be verified reliably on-chain

This will never happen because the only reason they're useful is because they take inputs from off the chain. The marketing is that users will be able to actually use these things to perform services. Of course that is self-contradictory because of the previous reason.

>This gives people equal access

No it doesn't, because only a small fraction of people are going to become smart contract programmers or are going to become skilled in auditing smart contracts. You might as well say all finance gives people equal access because anyone can become a CPA.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#216
post #87

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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 keep seeing this "eternal six months away" FUD, but no one wants to admit that it has literally just been postponed again https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1514010098145759232

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#217
post #74

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 marketplace without regulation and I will show you a marketplace best avoided if possible. I buy all of my vegetables from the roadside stands that are completely unregulated, and often set up in proximity to other stands with other offerings. I get a higher quality at a lower price - works out great.

Oh, those are regulated, for sure.

Try to steal from them and the cops will come after you, plus the risk to your physical integrity.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#218
post #161
post #106

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Do we have to accept that MEV is a problem? Just because it's been a tactic used in the shadows with traditional finance doesn't mean it's a problem in an open ecosystem where anyone willing to pay can play. There isn't some shadow elite funding a central government here lobbying for restrictive legislation to keep competition at arms length. In my opinion the crypto ecosystem in general is much more understanding an…

Something that rarely gets addressed in these discussions is why Ethereum even has fee market to begin with instead of a cheap FIFO model which ideally would be more fair. To answer that I would invite anyone to try using a blockchain under heavy load without any way for users to prioritize transactions. What you will find is the network becomes vulnerable to transaction spamming; possibly to point of breaking consen…

FIFO? First in first out? The blockchain is essentially the timestamping machine. The timestamp of a transaction are untrusted until mined into blocks, even then a fork can rid them.

The blockchain is essentially solving the ordering problem, one big timestamp machine. The solution you propose would require a timestamp machine in the first place lol.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]. A…

> Is Ethereum PoS yet? Simple Yes or No. It seems you've given a long answer which can be simplified to "No"

Along with pointers to current and historical information as to why arriving at PoS has been such a long and interesting road to hoe, while also being an open/source process involving teams and individuals all over the world.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#220
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…

No, the only use case is not illegal activity.

NFTs, smart contracts in general, gaming, defi/lending/staking, DEX, DAO, Filecoin/IPFS, and a few more in itself are not illegal. You may consider them to be useless, but that's not the same thing as illegal.

Even if you scrap all that, there's the remaining core use case of speculation. Which in itself is also not illegal and an incredibly important use case, if not THE use case.

You may be frown upon speculation, look down on it, judge it anyway you please, but it does not change the fact that 100M+ people with an exponential growth rate are into it. I guess growing your money is popular, who would figure that.

The point I would like to get across is that instead of judging, you should have a deeper look at the WHY. Many people think that these risk takers are plain dumb, selfish, irresponsible. If only regulation would protect them against themselves.

That's not the situation at all. They're fully self-aware. They are young people born into an economy that is plain broken to them. Burdened by student debt, stagnant/unlivable wages, unaffordable housing, zero or negative interest rates, high inflation, no job security, unaffordable healthcare.

They barely get by and have no outlook of ever getting ahead, owning any asset or wealth, and the very simple goal of a basic middle class life has become unattainable.

In a backdrop that cruel, why not throw the little money you have into a shitcoin? It might do a 10x. It might also go to zero. Who cares? You didn't have any meaningful wealth to begin with.

And that is the appeal of crypto. It's not fueled by greed for the sake of greed, it's fueled by desperation. Nothing to lose, everything to win. Crypto is an asymmetrical bet, and the only one available to everyone.

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