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Ethereum Has Issues

blog.dshr.org

251–260 of 377 posts

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#251

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What is a Crypto Andy?

Andy is a fairly new and derogatory/tongue in cheek term (from twitch, long story) that basically means people that get attention from jumping on someone else's creative bandwagon. Basically someone else does the creation, and you become an Andy by trying to get involved without really adding much value.

>that basically means people that get attention from jumping on someone else's creative bandwagon.

That isn't what the term Andy means in the Twitch world. It's just a way to refer to the style of content that someone makes on Twitch. For example, a "React Andy" is someone who makes reactionary content, a "1k Andy" is someone that is stuck at 1k average viewership, a "Crypto Andy" is someone who is obsessed with crypto.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#252
post #161

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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.

It’s what Cardano does

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#253

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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 You can take out a loan in crypto that's fully secured against some other crypto. It's turtles all the way down, and has zero relevance to what most people think about when they talk about taking out a loan.

How so? I just recently borrowed USD to buy a car at a lower rate than I could find elsewhere.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 or buy insurance and your counterparty is a smart contract is pretty interesting. No it isn't. I've been hearing this for years and I still haven't seen any reason anyone would actually want this, beyond the novelty factor. It's strictly worse than any other equivalent insurance or loan for a number of reasons, the worst one being that there's no human you can talk to when somet…

> there's no human you can talk to when something goes wrong.

This goes both ways. I may not want a smart contract for my life insurance, but I can perfectly imagine myself taking a lot of very small, very short insurances on mundane things because of the very low fee and hassle of smart contracts versus actually signing contracts and paying for the humans that will support it.

Think flight insurance, etc

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#255
post #91

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The water used on fields in my area is non-potable. As far as human waste goes, I don't think it's regulations preventing that, but rather efficiency. Other animal waste is used as fertilizer, because it works better.

That is incorrect. You'll find the relevant regulations here: https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/biosolids-laws-and-regulations

Your link does not support your claim. Crops are watered with non-potable water and it's not regulated. Any farmer can water their crops and sell them on the side of the road without any interference from the EPA.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#256
post #237

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>The fact that you can take out a loan or buy insurance and your counterparty is a smart contract is pretty interesting. No it isn't. I've been hearing this for years and I still haven't seen any reason anyone would actually want this, beyond the novelty factor. It's strictly worse than any other equivalent insurance or loan for a number of reasons, the worst one being that there's no human you can talk to when somet…

> the worst one being that there's no human you can talk to when something goes wrong. The worst part is that for a DeFi loan, you need something like 200% to 300% collateral (look it up, it varies but is usually around that amount). This makes it less than useless for just about all reasons people now get loans. The whole point of a loan is that you're willing to pay extra over time in order to have access to more f…

>The whole point of a loan is that you're willing to pay extra over time in order to have access to more funds at the present

No, that's not the point of these loans at all. They are the equivalent of remortgaging your home to get cash. If need money for renovation and you have a lot of equity in your house you can borrow against it. They are doing the same thing with crypto. They don't want to sell their crypto because they want to speculate on it and they need money so they use it as collateral.

I personably think it's a very stupid idea to invest in something like crypto on credit. Lending your crypto to these morons looks like a pretty good idea if you can trust that the smart contracts doesn't have bugs. You get a stable and guaranteed >5% without all the risks of the stock market.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#257
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…

Yea but let's be real, when most people think "smart contracts" what they really mean is "turing complete smart contracts."

If they think that, they've been bamboozled by someone trying to sell them something: There is no useful smart contract that can't be expressed as statement in a total language. (as transactions that take an infinite or undecidable time to validate aren't useful)

Turing completeness is a complete red-hearing in this application space.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#258

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I get a higher quality at a lower price - works out great. Are you sure? A lot of these are "the hippies ripping off the yuppies". In my area, they often sell the same stuff as the grocery stores --- just priced differently. A little basket of 4 tomatoes (usually about 2 lbs) is $5. The grocery store price is $1.49/lb (or less if you shop at Lidl or Aldi). The price isn't regulated but there are lots of other regulat…

Really depends on where you live. In South Florida, the roadside and farm-affiliated vendors really do sell higher quality product for less money. I have picked up better quality mangoes off the side of the road than I can buy at a supermarket. But I grew up in Homestead, near the Redland agricultural area.

In the Tampa area farmers markets, you can buy all of the produce that farmers took to Lakeland to sell to Publix but was rejected.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#259
post #197

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>The fact that you can take out a loan or buy insurance and your counterparty is a smart contract is pretty interesting. No it isn't. I've been hearing this for years and I still haven't seen any reason anyone would actually want this, beyond the novelty factor. It's strictly worse than any other equivalent insurance or loan for a number of reasons, the worst one being that there's no human you can talk to when somet…

A number years ago I was unemployed for an extended period of time while working on open source projects, and I ran out of money, so I took out a loan to cover my expenses. I lived off this money for several months until I found a suitable job, and after some time I repaid this loan. This type of personal credit financing would cost a fortune in regular finance (try going to a bank and taking out a loan because you'r…

That makes no sense.

> try going to a bank and taking out a loan because you're broke and unemployed), but because I had digital assets to pawn

"Broke" means you have no assets, thus you have nothing to pawn, therefore the loan would be unsecured. You COULD NOT have obtained such a loan via defi, and while you could have obtained one in the traditional finance system (which is strictly an advantage over defi...), it would be have been, yes, very expensive.

But you weren't broke! You had assets! The traditional finance system loves to lend money secured by liquid assets, does so all the time, and at lower interest rates!

> I don't understand how it's difficult to see the utility in having digital goods of value

...digital goods of value. Otherwise known as a number on a ledger somewhere, otherwise known as a bank account? Nothing in your story in any way depended on crypto/defi; every part of it is a normal, traditional part of the financial system. All crypto added here was higher costs and a worse UI.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#260

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ChainLink just distributes the trust around making it harder too corrupt but in no way solves the issue.

Trying to understand by going through this: https://blog.chain.link/what-is-the-blockchain-oracle-proble... Aren't they precisely solving the issue?

I came away from reading that article with almost no insight into how the problem is purportedly solved. The last section briefly lists a number of security techniques Chainlink uses, adding that these are “just some of [its] many features”, but doesn’t go into much detail.

I’m not sure they ever even outright state that this particular network resolves the oracle problem. Are you sure that’s the article you wanted to share?

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