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The Decentralized Future

blog.ycombinator.com

141–144 of 144 posts

Re: The Decentralized Future

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, appreciate the patronising explanation, as if I'm some sort of idiot just waiting to find the road to Damascus. I understand the technology perfectly well. I read the Cryptoassets book to try and undsetand exactly that: the value of them as 'assets'. I came away exceedingly underwhelmed.

If LOL'ing and making snarky comments about how you understand but it's still underwhelming makes you feel better, good for you. But I have never seen a single person who truly "understand the technology perfectly well" say it's underwhelming. Most of those who actually dug deep enough to "truly understand" do see the limitations, but because by that point they understand the potential, they see the limitations as pr…

>never seen a single person who truly "understand the technology perfectly well" say it's underwhelming

I'd say I've noticed an inverse correlation - people who don't understand the technology see it as this amazing thing, the kind of people who know their hash functions are a bit skeptical.

Re: The Decentralized Future

#142
post #6

I’ve reacently read the Burnskie book about crypto assets in the hope that I might come away more enlightened about the market and how to assess it. The opposite was the case. After reading the book and looking into it more, it’s very hard to see these things as assets at the moment, or to see much utility in the technology. Don’t get me wrong, there certainly is some and it is certainly ‘cool’, but right now blockha…

Money transfer is still very difficult. As in right now, short of paypal, I cannot send you money easily without leaving my chair in under 1 minute regardless of where you are in the world. Send me your bitcoin address and the problem is solved. The biggest problems with Bitcoin (specifically) are: 1) it is not necessarily a store of value and 2) it fluctuates too much. If someone can solve these two problems then we…

You'll be doing well to get a bitcoin payment through in less than a minute. Half an hour plus is typical. There are faster cryptos though.

Re: The Decentralized Future

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Raiden is a poor and incomplete implementation of Lightning. Raiden is a comprehensive implementation that includes Lightning Networks for ERC20 tokens, something that Bitcoin doesn't even have. >>Proof of stake is a pipe dream. Your information is incorrect. Ethereum's proof of stake is close to complete conceptually and the first version, a hybrid PoW/PoS protocol called Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget, is cu…

> Raiden is a comprehensive implementation Is the lone implementation which is still on testnet and no ecosystem surrounding it. > ERC20 tokens, something that Bitcoin doesn't even have. Bitcoin has no interest in implementing an equivalent as a layer-1 feature. This should be a surprise to no one. Off-chain scaling is the official direction of the Bitcoin community. There's no interest in adding bloat to the layer 1…

>>Is the lone implementation which is still on testnet and no ecosystem surrounding it.

You're right that it's incomplete, in the sense that it's not completely finished, but not much more incomplete than the LN implementations on Bitcoin. They're on mainnet, but the developers say it's just there for testing purposes, and large amounts should be transacted on it. Its ecosystem is limited to buying sweaters from Blockstream and buying a VPN subscription.

To claim that the Raiden implementation is significantly behind the Bitcoin ones is misleading.

>>Bitcoin has no interest in implementing an equivalent as a layer-1 feature.

Which is a disastrous technical decision based on absurd self-defeating dogma. Ethereum already has 92% of the token market capitalization, up from 73% in July 2017. All the while, the token market grew from $4 billion to $60 billion.

Network effects matter, and the destructive dogma you're promoting resulted in Bitcoin letting Ethereum becoming the dominant crypto-asset platform, with a growing share of a rapidly growing market.

In any case, the fact that Raiden has ERC20-compatibility is another example of why your characterization of it as being "a poor and incomplete implementation of Lightning" is absurd. It's a comprehensive, full-featured implementation that is very nearly complete.

>>It's not any where near complete, which is why the difficulty bomb was rolled back (which in and of itself is hilarious -- Ethereum only pretends to be decentralized).

I didn't say it is "anywhere near complete". I said that Ethereum's proof of stake is close to complete conceptually and the first version, a hybrid PoW/PoS protocol called Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget, is currently under development and will be implemented in Ethereum soon.

>>Easily proved false, anyone reading can take a look at the respective github repos. Bitcoin currently has over 550 contributors, Ethereum only has 200. Bitcoin has over 16k commits. Ethereum has only 9k. This doesn't even take into account the larger ecosystem of software Bitcoin has.

Ethereum developers are working on all of the Dapps being built on top of Ethereum, each of which has its own set of repositories.

Only comparing the repositories for the Bitcoin and Ethereum official projects, which are centred only around the main clients, is an absolutely ridiculous measure of total development activity with respect to the platform.

And even this comparison is extremely disingenuous. You're comparing ONE repository hosted by the Ethereum project to one repository hosted by the Bitcoin project, when the Ethereum project has its work divided across a far larger number of repositories (151 vs 4):

https://github.com/ethereum

https://github.com/bitcoin/

It seems like every single argument you've made is misleading.

>>He described how to solve it 4 years ago, yet they still can't release even a hybrid PoS solution.

Good development takes time. The fact that the implementation has taken time to develop is not an indictment of the solution provided by VB to the Nothing at Stake problem.

>>Slasher does not solve the nothing at stake problem, it merely obfuscates it.

Ethereum is not developing Slasher, which was a very early proposal that does not contain the solution to the Nothing at Stake problem that VB proposed in the linked article.

At least learn the basic facts before confidently criticizing Ethereum.

>>Lack of Turing Completeness is a feature and intentional.

The lack of Turing Completeness limits the range and sophistication of second layer solutions that can be built on top of a blockchain. Ethereum's range of second layer solutions is far larger than Bitcoin as a result of having it. Turing-Completeness is an incredible benefit, and it's very shortsighted (or malicious) to discounts its value.

>>That's cute. Ethereum doesn't even have any "consumer grade" nodes today.

Sure it does. SSDs are consumer grade hardware, and the recent Geth update allows HDDs to sync as well. Sharding allows massive scaling while still preserving the ability of nodes to run consumer grade hardware. You have no response to this point except your snarky "that's cute".

>>Anyways, sounds like you're taking the long way around to agreeing with me: Sharding sacrifices security.

I explicitly disagreed with you. You can't even respond honestly to my comments at a basic level.

>>Again, taking the long way around to agreeing with me.

I just disagreed with you!

Here I'll past the comment again:

"HDDs have been having syncing problems, but that was solved in the most recent Geth release."

Translation: HDDs work fine now. You do not need an SSD. So I disagreed with you. Please stop lying so much.

>>A full archive node currently requires a 400GB SSD!

A full archive node is not necessary for full validation. Full validation only requires 30 GB, and like I just explained, it's now possible with HDDs as well.

>>A little early to make any of these claims...the only popular Dapp in recent memory is cryptokitties

It is currently the most widely used Dapp platform. That's factually true. And the development happening on new Dapps dwarfs anything happening on any other platform.

>>it brought the Ethereum network to its knees.

Even at its most congested, Ethereum did not get anywhere near as congested as Bitcoin, so you are implicitly arguing that Bitcoin is regularly brought to its knees, to a much more severe degree than Ethereum, and while processing one-third as many transactions.

Re: The Decentralized Future

#144
post #43
post #41

> When Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin Whitepaper he defined it as a peer to peer electronic cash system. How do we know Satoshi is a he ?

Of course we don't know for sure whether Satoshi is really a man, a woman, or a group of people. But for ease of conversation, people use the gender and number of the pseudonym (masculine, singular).

That is an embarrassingly obvious answer, thank you. Someone had told me Satoshi was a made-up name without a clear gender, and I had never bothered to check that fact.
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