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Ethereum Has Issues

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Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#231

Post by FabHK »

fleddr wrote: post #220
jmyeet wrote: 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 TH…

You make a case for crypto speculation as the only way for youngsters to get rich. I'd like to point out that crypto is arguably a negative-sum game, ie only some can get rich, and only at the expense of others. This is in stark contrast to equity markets as a whole.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#232

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

_Nat_ wrote: post #143
px43 wrote: post #70

Ha, Flash Boys 2.0 was from 2019. This blog post is literally "I read a thing from three years ago and have lost faith in something that I never believed in in the first place". As someone who knows and has worked with all the people involved with the write-ups referenced in this blog post, I can pretty confidently say that the author is way way behind here. There have been some insane advancements in recent years th…

> As someone who knows and has worked with all the people involved with the write-ups referenced in this blog post, I can pretty confidently say that the author is way way behind here. There have been some insane advancements in recent years that would blow his mind. Looks like they link a lot of stuff from the past month. Examples of links in the article from within the last month: 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.1593…

If it's published, it's already lost alpha to the publisher, in 90%+ of cases.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#233

Post by ChrisClark »

sl3232323 wrote: post #228
pshc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

Wow, that's such an elegant argument you have there!

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#234

Post by FabHK »

thebean11 wrote: post #54
jmyeet wrote: 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…

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.

How do you solve the oracle problem? How do you enforce that a loan be paid back? How do you check that an insurance case has actually occurred? You need institutions to determine and oversee this, and institutions you can trust. If you need to trust them anyway, you can dispense with the hugely inefficient "Proof of Waste" blockchain stuff, and have any required computations run on a few old PCs.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#235

Post by FabHK »

jmyeet wrote: post #125
thebean11 wrote: post #54

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.

There are a lot of these theoretical cases but none seem likely to come to fruition anytime soon and pretty much all of them ignore this basic problem: the transactional nature of blockchains falls apart as soon as you interact with the real world. Let me explain: you can have a smart contract where you get 5-20% of the value whenevder it's sold and that'll work and be guaranteed (assuming the network isn't compromis…

AKA the oracle problem.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#236

Post by [deleted] »

Raidion wrote: post #111
jerry1979 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#237

Post by bnralt »

throwaway82652 wrote: post #118
thebean11 wrote: post #54

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…

> 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 funds at the present. With DeFi loans, you pay extra over time and have less access to funds than you would have had without the loan.

It only really makes sense for crypto gamblers, who are hoping that their collateral has insane appreciation that will offset the downsides. If anything, DeFi loans are less like actual loans and more like crypto gambling partnerships where one partner takes a position with lower risks and rewards and the other takes a position of higher risks and rewards.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#238

Post by orzig »

wpietri wrote: post #223
jmyeet wrote: 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…

This is beautiful and perfect: > the essence of the American Dream: by getting rich by doing nothing while lauding how smart you are over other people Thanks for sharing it.

But is it true? Any nation of 330M will have some loud arrogant people, but is “getting rich by doing nothing” uniquely American in aspiration or reality?

I’d argue no - our aspiration is that we’re farmer cowboys, our rich all the more so. Our reality is more complicated, but (for its many flaws) different than alleged here.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#239

Post by FabHK »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #92

This is not directly related to the content of the post but is about Ethereum. I have been putting this hypothesis out there on twitter for a while now, looking for someone to refute me, but no one has yet. This seems like a place where I might be able to find someone who understand Ethereum enough tell my grasp of the protocol is wrong (or right): Ethereum is going deflationary. Not disinflationary like Bitcoin, but…

1. Interesting question, and I haven't seen an answer that refutes your point, except in disputing that the supply of ETH will keep shrinking.

2. I'd like to distinguish an increase of the money supply from inflation. They're not the same. You're talking about a decrease in the supply of ETH, here, not deflation.

3. Related: While the supply of BTC is currently growing around 1.7% p.a., I wonder how much is lost to lost keys. Has that been estimated somewhere?

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#240

Post by calsy »

px43 wrote: post #70

Ha, Flash Boys 2.0 was from 2019. This blog post is literally "I read a thing from three years ago and have lost faith in something that I never believed in in the first place". As someone who knows and has worked with all the people involved with the write-ups referenced in this blog post, I can pretty confidently say that the author is way way behind here. There have been some insane advancements in recent years th…

Saying insane a lot, pretty confident, and cherry picking some text to 'literally' dismiss the entire blog post with a single sentence that just serves to validate your flimsy reasoning doesn't make a good argument.
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