Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

0xfoobar.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 338 posts

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#311

Post by hnthrow1010 »

nine_k wrote: post #281
thelamest wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only be sure in hindsight which solution is comparatively or net good. Not all hard work done by smart and nice people turns out to be worthwhile. There are always trade-offs and cryptoassets bring them too. You have good reasons to be worried about centralization, but concerns that this technology empowers crime and totalitarianism, just in a different way, are valid too.

All technical solutions are trade-offs. See, burning coal is bad for the environment under many angles. But it fed the energy to the industrial revolution, with immense improvements to everyone's quality of life (from running water to advanced medical care). Now it's time to retire it, but it won't be realistic to go from muscle power to nuclear and solar power directly. Same thing with crypto currency. It's like a s…

>it already solves real problems.

That's not true though. Crypto currencies do not solve any real problems in any meaningful sense. The problems it solves are all either problems that were created by crypto itself, due to the insistence on using that particular network architecture (which isn't even good), or are better solved in other ways. Moving to proof of stake fixes one of the fatal flaws in the scheme: the energy usage. All of the other fatal flaws still remain: The inability to do anything about fraud, the disastrous security of smart contracts, the ponzi-like economics, the inherent unfairness of mining/staking, the practical lack of decentralization and vulnerability to 67% attacks, the lack of any kind of legal structure around anything whatsoever, and not to mention that the technology is actively enabling new kinds of crimes like ransomware and evading sanctions on a grand scale...

It's patently obvious that the "tradeoff" for most people is that you get to gamble on the price of a highly speculative asset in exchange for enabling massive amounts of crime. I don't like that tradeoff. As a society, we can collectively decide not to make it.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#312

Post by aeternum »

rglullis wrote: post #302
cowtools wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but etherium forked in favor of the stakeholders.

Depends on who you ask, and what fork they would rather be. Those that decide against the fork stayed on what became "classic".

Which is the ultimate form of consensus: which fork does society actually choose to use?

In the end, that's what really matters.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#313

Post by nine_k »

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #311
nine_k wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All technical solutions are trade-offs. See, burning coal is bad for the environment under many angles. But it fed the energy to the industrial revolution, with immense improvements to everyone's quality of life (from running water to advanced medical care). Now it's time to retire it, but it won't be realistic to go from muscle power to nuclear and solar power directly. Same thing with crypto currency. It's like a s…

>it already solves real problems. That's not true though. Crypto currencies do not solve any real problems in any meaningful sense. The problems it solves are all either problems that were created by crypto itself, due to the insistence on using that particular network architecture (which isn't even good), or are better solved in other ways. Moving to proof of stake fixes one of the fatal flaws in the scheme: the ene…

Why. Imagine that I lawfully own something valuable which is located in Russia: say, a moderate-size business, or a piece of realty. I want to stop dealing with them, sell the assets, and take away the funds.

My two options are: (1) Fly there, sell stuff, and bring a suitcase of cash. (1) Sell stuff remotely and transfer the payment over Bitcoin. I suspect that the second option is more economical even with the proof-of-work electricity-guzzling proof-of-work BTC network, because two transatlantic flights are even worse.

You'll call this a marginal problem. I'll say that marginal problems are still real, and need solutions.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#314

Post by hnthrow1010 »

didericis wrote: post #231
haxiomic wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an appealing idea and what attracts so many bright minds to crypto. People voting with their money for their interests or the interests of the group. Love it. But that’s not how this dynamical system plays out. It would perhaps stand a chance if players could make transaction decisions based on information about the other party but that just isn’t the case in practise. Bad actors have had no issue obscuring sour…

Well said, agree with all of that. I have hope for systems that allow for the easy, anonymous (to outside observers, at least) build up of networks for the kind of information exchange you rightly claim to be the most important aspect of creating good systems in practice. It doesn’t solve that information bottleneck problem, but I think the more efficient structures that lead to transactional bottlenecks and are nece…

>but I think the more efficient structures that lead to transactional bottlenecks and are necessary in things like Bitcoin are technical problems that can and I think have been worked out in currencies like Monero

That might be true, but the structure doesn't appear to have any technical considerations behind it. Following this comment:

>At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences.

If you ask me, the conclusion to this is that Monero has not actually "resisted" centralization, what it's actually done is become centralized around a group of criminals who all refuse to snitch on each other, and use the token as a means to do that. The key part is that "refuse to snitch on each other" comes before everything else including all the blockchain nonsense. These people are the only group who have any reason to bother using this token. Attacking the Monero network itself is orthogonal to what is typically done to break up these groups.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#315

Post by hnthrow1010 »

nine_k wrote: post #313
hnthrow1010 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it already solves real problems. That's not true though. Crypto currencies do not solve any real problems in any meaningful sense. The problems it solves are all either problems that were created by crypto itself, due to the insistence on using that particular network architecture (which isn't even good), or are better solved in other ways. Moving to proof of stake fixes one of the fatal flaws in the scheme: the ene…

Why. Imagine that I lawfully own something valuable which is located in Russia: say, a moderate-size business, or a piece of realty. I want to stop dealing with them, sell the assets, and take away the funds. My two options are: (1) Fly there, sell stuff, and bring a suitcase of cash. (1) Sell stuff remotely and transfer the payment over Bitcoin. I suspect that the second option is more economical even with the proof…

Or just trade it for some other asset or currency that isn't crypto? Why are those your only two options? I don't understand how you jumped from "I need to trade something" to "my only option is cash or crypto". Those dots don't line up.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#316

Post by hnthrow1010 »

0xfoobar wrote: post #169
SilverBirch wrote: post #54

>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…

Article author here. The tradeoffs between centralized control and permissionless primitives are better explored elsewhere, but the dangerously high costs of depending on a fickle intermediary for all transactions should be clear to any informed observer. Consider a Russian citizen unable to flee Putin's wartorn regime because all personal life savings and assets have been frozen. Just as private communications make…

Hello, I read your twitter thread. While privacy is absolutely important, your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. In the context of financial transactions, we know from a ridiculous amount of history with banking regulations that it's not ordinary people who benefit from having complete privacy and anonymity in all matters. It's criminals and fraudsters who lie and misrepresent themselves to conceal the source of their funds and their activities. They'll gladly continue to use their privacy as a weapon to disguise themselves and further rob and steal. There is no other group that benefits as much from being able to transfer large amounts of money secretly. This can be verified over and over again, ask any traditional company that processes international remittances.

It doesn't really matter what kind of political activism you believe you're engaging in: the reality is, these nasties are the main people that benefit. They absolutely love what you're doing. Anyone involved in cryptocurrency, even tangentially, is complicit in this fraud because it's the only way these currencies have any significant value to begin with. And it will continue to happen for the indefinite future, because even with this new move ETH will still have no capital controls to prevent any of the massive market manipulation that happened over the last few years, that drove tons more fraud and ransomware and also resulted in the recent crash.

A system that tries to give privacy but does nothing to stop fraud is just creating worse problems under the false guise of helping people. I ask that you please stop working on these things and please stop promoting them until you can dial the whole thing back to rectify this situation. Any kind of "censorship resistance" without fraud prevention is not going to work. If enough people put their heads together they can solve this, but it will not happen with any of the supposed "privacy solutions" you mentioned. Yes, I'm aware the traditional finance system also has many of the same problems. It's not helping to recreate the exact same system but with even more layers of technical debt around it, which is essentially all you'll be able to do with any of the suggested tools.

Regarding the example of Russia, please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32013981

The system you have built specifically and explicitly provides much less cover to the Russian citizens than it does to Putin's regime, who will gladly adopt it and then turn around and use the proceeds to further oppress, murder and destroy. It is a net loss for privacy.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#317

Post by ShamelessC »

yellowapple wrote: post #248
jayd16 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bad tool is used by bad guys so don't support it" doesn't imply "any tool used by bad guys is bad." It's perfectly valid to think that different tech has different value based on specific pros and cons.

Right, but this presupposes that the particular tool in question is a "bad tool", and the basis of that presupposition elsewhere in this thread is very strongly implied to be "tool is used by bad guys therefore it's bad unless I specifically benefit from it".

Eh, that wasn’t my read. More that it seems to be exclusively used by bad people.

The lack of people manually verifying the _nature_ of a transaction and not just that someone claimed a transaction occurred means everything you’re doing is, well, pointless. It is (highly optimistically) a libertarian political movement that is deeply misinformed about how free markets and trust actually work.

Cryptocurrency has zero effective solutions for this. If you were to send your money to anyone claiming to be a NK citizen, you still have to personally verify entire transaction occurs, or you’ll get grifted. It’s useless. You’re being grifted. You’re making it worse by continuing to defend it and at some point you’re culpable for not admitting this despite it coming up on literally every hacker news post about cryptocurrency.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#318

Post by nine_k »

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #315
nine_k wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why. Imagine that I lawfully own something valuable which is located in Russia: say, a moderate-size business, or a piece of realty. I want to stop dealing with them, sell the assets, and take away the funds. My two options are: (1) Fly there, sell stuff, and bring a suitcase of cash. (1) Sell stuff remotely and transfer the payment over Bitcoin. I suspect that the second option is more economical even with the proof…

Or just trade it for some other asset or currency that isn't crypto? Why are those your only two options? I don't understand how you jumped from "I need to trade something" to "my only option is cash or crypto". Those dots don't line up.

I specifically used Russia as an example, because transferrimg nearly any fiat currency between it and the West is now blocked, due to the sanctions.

If Swift transfers worked, they could be a preferred alternative.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#319

Post by hnthrow1010 »

nine_k wrote: post #318
hnthrow1010 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just trade it for some other asset or currency that isn't crypto? Why are those your only two options? I don't understand how you jumped from "I need to trade something" to "my only option is cash or crypto". Those dots don't line up.

I specifically used Russia as an example, because transferrimg nearly any fiat currency between it and the West is now blocked, due to the sanctions. If Swift transfers worked, they could be a preferred alternative.

The sanctions will also be blocking the legal crypto exchanges from dealing with them as well. So that isn't going to work either. You might respond that you'll just use an illegal crypto exchange, but from that perspective it's not the crypto helping you. It's the illegal exchange, which doesn't actually need crypto to function.

Edit: Also, there's a bit more to unpack here. The transfers from Russia are only a problem with RUB. If you can transfer another currency to them into an offshore bank account then it's not a problem. And I hope you don't transact in RUB anyway, that likely means selling the business back to Putin's war regime, unless you physically go over there and use the proceeds to help the anti-war movement.

Re: Ethereum Proof-of-Stake

#320

Post by ETH_start »

throwaway290 wrote: post #310
ETH_start wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>If you do that, cryptocurrency benefits become moot: a Russian freelancer working overseas can legally TransferWise money to help her mom, but a Putin-connected oligarch can't wire money to help the regime There are plenty of nationalities which are banned from TransferWise: https://wise.com/help/articles/2813542/why-cant-i-open-a-wis... Russians may one day join that list.

Maybe you misunderstood me. This year Russians got de facto banned from many services, cannot use paid features of Github (Copilot or sponsoring projects), are blocked by freelancer marketplaces, etc. I am not risking using TransferWise to transfer money home (to a non-sanctioned individual's account in a non-sanctioned bank) out of fear of losing my account forever. This is because Western companies interpret sancti…

Yes, I totally misunderstood you, apologies.

I agree with everything you said, except this:

>>However, blanket financial anonymity at scale is not an acceptable workaround

Blanket financial anonymity is the only way to prevent circumstances like today's, where entire nationalities are locked out of the global financial system, and power becomes more concentrated over time.

Post reply on HN