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Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

vitalik.eth.limo

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Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#81

Post by drak0n1c »

bigyikes wrote: post #38
hanniabu wrote: post #11

> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly. Really looking forward to the next couple years. Everyone has been writing this off as "no killer apps after 10 years" but there's a lot that's been happening to support adoption, from scaling to improved UX. In the next couple years those should percolat…

What value proposition does crypto offer that existing solutions do not? The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is “decentralization” and the lack of trust required. The problem is, most people are perfectly fine trusting their financial institutions. Another commenter was downvoted for saying “No one cares”, but a more precise way of putting this is “the average person doesn’t care about decentra…

Decentralization of compute is perhaps a more compelling story. There have been many recent complaints of massive digital networks being at the whim of centralized IP and platform owners making unpopular decisions - whether in social media or games. Even non-profit and volunteer projects collapse when leaders abandon ship or become tyrants. What if open source code could also be extended to open decentralized hosting via micropayments - the direction of which all decided by users in a participatory format - whether via representative republic, direct democracy, or elected dictator?

The obstacle is human nature and ease-of-use friction - taking responsibility for maintenance and innovation and imposing a participatory need requires a modicum of awareness and willingness to contribute - even if only with pennies. This is annoying and wasteful red tape for most, and so corporations with strong advertisers and investors who can provide it cheaper or for free are obviously seen as the better choice. Co-ops and communes have this problem.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#82

Post by EMM_386 »

Hmm ... "proto-danksharding" which activated the "blobscriptions protocol" so that blobs are "much cheaper than calldata", all of this helping it to become an "L2-centric ecosystem". In the end, this leaves them "not confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier".

I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#83

Post by ongy »

benreesman wrote: post #49
orthecreedence wrote: post #6

I'm so out of the loop these days...I've written off blockchain junk almost entirely. Can someone break down what blobs are? Is this some kind of temporary place for transactions to go so they aren't charged fees individually? EDIT: NVM, I RTFMed https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/ . I wonder what the trade-offs of layer 2 protocols are. Less secure?

As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doc…

This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen.

Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios. There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains specifically.

Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famous person under that name I can find is a historian, not an expert in computing related topics.

There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on (remember, git storage is a blockchain) but the value proposition of crypo currency blockchains (largely 0 trust) have so far not materialized outside speculative currency.

Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the developers of e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the party that would have to enable something do not have an incentive to give up controle.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#84

Post by hot_gril »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #71
maxcoder4 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it everywhere where it's an option (so not very often, let's say once a month). I also only use privacy services (vpn for example) where you can pay using cryptocurrency, otherwise what's the point

What are some other examples, except for a VPN where you use crypto to pay? And how is the situation around the world - are retailers who offer digital goods/services allowed to accept crypto as payments?

There are hardly any retailers accepting it in the US. Wonder how it is in El Salvador, since they made BTC legal tender.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#85

Post by k8svet »

wesselbindt wrote: post #29
hanniabu wrote: post #7

Pleasantly surprised to find this here, especially without all the "tokens are a scam" comments

I'm with you, they feel a bit redundant and uninteresting at this point. Like we get it, a spade's a spade, no reason to go on about it. Imagine people commented "postgres is a database" on every postgres related post.

You know, from the way crypto threads are moderated, I bet I can guess dang's opinion about them. Just ridiculously vapid content.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#86

Post by dang »

killthebuddha wrote: post #17

I think it would be useful if the full domain (vitalik.eth.limo) was displayed. Not sure if that's possible or if it violates any HN policies about how links are displayed, apologies if it's a silly/useless suggestion. Edit: Not sure how popularis eth.limo w.r.t. to HN submissions, but the full domain should probably be displayed for any eth.limo submission.

Ok!

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#87

Post by everfree »

skybrian wrote: post #72
everfree wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solana does not have blobs. It’s really as simple as that.

It seems to have low-cost transactions. Isn’t that what the blobs are for? (Among other things.) (Sincere question; I don’t follow cryptocurrencies very closely.)

Because transaction fees on blockchains run as an auction market, low-cost transactions are enabled by high transaction throughput, at least relative to demand. In other words, any chain that has high throughput and/or low demand will have low-cost transactions. Solana and Ethereum attempt to achieve high throughput in very different ways.

Ethereum blobs create transaction space that has a 0-of-n trust model (for zk-roll-ups) or a 1-of-n trust model (for optimistic roll-ups). This means that there needs to be either zero or one honest participant who carefully receives, processes and validates every single roll-up transaction in order for an outsider to be able to prove that the chain was not tampered with.

In contrast, Solana achieves throughput by taking the classic blockchain structure (with its n-of-n trust model) and cranking the parameters up to 11. Basically they said "be a standard blockchain, but do everything a hundred times faster on expensive servers with beefy CPUs and datacenter connections". The advantages are that it took less development time and there are less moving parts in the stack. The disadvantage is that the Solana blockchain is not actually verifiable, in the sense that you or I could download a piece of software onto our home computer and follow along with the chain to make sure it's valid. Ethereum is verifiable in this way, even down through all of its (properly-designed and fully implemented) L2s.

To distill the entire situation: In order to scale, Solana gives up some of the fundamental properties that make blockchains powerful. Ethereum, scaling with blobs, retains these fundamental blockchain properties.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#89

Post by everfree »

EMM_386 wrote: post #82

Hmm ... "proto-danksharding" which activated the "blobscriptions protocol" so that blobs are "much cheaper than calldata", all of this helping it to become an "L2-centric ecosystem". In the end, this leaves them "not confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier". I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.

The actual quote is "we are not *currently* at the point where we can be confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier". The article seems to imply that "in the end", they will be.

Re: Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

#90

Post by tdudhhu »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #36

All this crpyto technology is fascinating. But is it used for anything? I asked this in an Ask HN today, but got no answer so far: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852389 It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything. If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What could be a near term use case…

Some days ago ICP showed it can run ML on a blockchain.

While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.

But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.

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