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The Problem with Ethereum

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Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#251

Post by jl2718 »

shp0ngle wrote: post #96

Who the hell cares. Crypto people were warned repeatedly, since 2017 (and arguably even sooner), that this is all a scam and they should not put their money there. They ignored those messages for years, put the money there anyway (because the number goes up), so, tough luck. Articles "network XY is more decentralized than network YZ" are boring.

Because at some point the banks will fail and one of these ‘scams’ is going to be necessary for you to get along in life.

I’m sorry that this is the case; I really wish that the system we live in was sustainable, but it’s not, and it probably won’t be reformed before it’s too late. Maybe this is a matter of opinion, but it happens to be the most common opinion of people that have studied the matter without incentive to believe one narrative. I have never seen a well-informed defense by an independent writer that did not rely almost exclusively on appeal to authority.

There are opportunists. There are scammers. That’s not how this thing got started. We started this to mitigate an unstoppable problem. I personally never liked many economic aspects of the Bitcoin protocol, and dismissed it very early. I know many others that aped into mining a fortune based on much less understanding. I’m now willing to accept that it is the least bad of likely candidate solutions, and the reason for that is that all newer entrants cannot gain relevance without massive investment, which means owners from the old failing system.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#252

Post by whalabi »

Author declares themselves a "bitcoiner" and writes things like:

> PostNote: This article pairs well with my piece on Bitcoiners having integrity. What it boils down to is there is no integrity in Ethereum and nothing but integrity in Bitcoin

Which seems a little...

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#253

Post by dcow »

latchkey wrote: post #23
dcow wrote: post #19

I lost interest in Eth when the “code is law” law was broken. I’m glad I did. I don’t believe proof of steak is the correct solution to the energy required for proof of work. To be clear, a lot of good insight has come from Eth, but I’m not ideologically bought in anymore. Recently I have been exploring Chia as a farmer. Rather than the ruling class being a group devs and random early miners, the ruling class is a (s…

As far as I understand it, Chia suffers from the problem of just filling hard disks with useless data. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-... Filecoin is a more viable and useful option imho.

There are way more HDDs lying around needing to be used than GPUs, though. Storage is so much easier to come by. File coin has structural problems like you cant mine filecoin without first buying filecoin to stake…

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#254

Post by lottin »

NiloCK wrote: post #230
yunohn wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Proof of Humanity, a system combining webs of trust, with reverse Turing tests, and dispute resolution to create a sybil-proof list of humans.” This is their mission, and the rest of the website focuses on ID and such services. Not one mention of poverty alleviation.

The connection here is that sybil-proofing is a (the?) major bottleneck to cryptoeconomic UBI schemes.

Are you serious?

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#255

Post by lottin »

paulgb wrote: post #186
TimJRobinson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Bitcoin is a better store of value, Ethereum is a better tech stack for innovation. They serve different purposes and so should have different development schedules and risk aversion.

At its core, a store of value is just something that other people will desire as much now as they do at some later point in time. In that sense, Bitcoin runs the risk of being left behind if PoW at 7tx/sec becomes seen as the dial-up modem of crypto.

A store of value is a meaningless term. Value can't be stored. Stuff can be stored. And no assurances can be made as to whether stuff will keep its value over time. Anyone who does that is a charlatan.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#256

Post by lottin »

dash2 wrote: post #150
kristofferR wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(b) is why Bitcoin core development has stagnated[*]. And that's fine if people just want it to be like gold, however Ethereum doesn't aspire to not evolve. (c) I actually disagree with. Decentralized governance is a very interesting subject, and some cryptos like Tezos are governed quite decentralized in many ways. Right now I'm really confident in how Ethereum is governed, with the "old-fashioned" open-source devel…

Decentralized governance is interesting like nuclear fusion: it's 30 years away and always will be. Real governance requires somebody to take the time and effort to think about solutions to public goods problems. In other words, governance is a public good. Decentralizing it just results in underprovision.

> Decentralized governance

Do you mean voting? Has been around since ancient Greece.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#257

Post by dcow »

iSnow wrote: post #218
dcow wrote: post #19

I lost interest in Eth when the “code is law” law was broken. I’m glad I did. I don’t believe proof of steak is the correct solution to the energy required for proof of work. To be clear, a lot of good insight has come from Eth, but I’m not ideologically bought in anymore. Recently I have been exploring Chia as a farmer. Rather than the ruling class being a group devs and random early miners, the ruling class is a (s…

Chia seems completely brain-dead. Buying up HDs and SSDs to fill them with junk data and getting coins for that. In what universe does that make sense? I'd rather support Bitcoin miners as they only cause an ASIC shortage, a SSD shortage is much worse for me.

A universe where tons of old storage gets thrown out. Why not reuse it?

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#258

Post by lottin »

yholio wrote: post #94
dash2 wrote: post #7

"Something here seems awfully similar to the system that crypto-currency was meant to fix. It was meant to eliminate rulers. It was meant to make everyone accountable for their actions. It was meant to reward the intelligent, the hard working and the capable, and not reward the incompetent, or the makers-yet-breakers of promises. However, this repeat of the broken old system seems to be playing out again." One respon…

There is nothing wrong with technical solutions to social problems per se. For example, sovereigns tend to spy on their citizenry, and the technical solutions of cryptography and steganography help mitigate that, albeit in a limited way. The problem with Bitcoin at al is that they propose wrong solutions to ill defined social problems. Absolutely no real macroeconomic insight was put in the initial bitcoin halving bl…

A solution looking for a problem, basically.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#259

Post by ex3ndr »

kristofferR wrote: post #16
DenseComet wrote: post #6

Seems like one of the core arguments of this is that the the core devs have pushed the difficulty bomb multiple times because they've missed their original timelines for switching to PoS without any repercussions. It seems to me that this is actually the correct thing to do. I'd rather the core devs take their time and iron out the issues instead of being incentivized to play fast and loose with a system that manages…

Yeah, Ethereum's development isn't a simple project that can be rushed, it's massively complicated. This road map comes to mind: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540... It's very outdated now, that's not the point. The point is that every circle on the road map is a very complicated project in and of itself that needs tons of research, development and testing to be implemented properly. Just t…

This is clearly NOT a complicated roadmap. Any even small sized social app for photo sharing is much much bigger.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#260

Post by cliftonk »

javert wrote: post #111
cliftonk wrote: post #14

That this gets upvoted to #2 speaks poorly of HN. Why on earth are we still talking about the DAO? This is a collection of tired, irrelevant arguments that entirely ignores product-market fit and a large, vibrant community of developers. [edit] ah, of course. a bitcoin maximalist. how dare there be an alternative use-case for crypto that involves people using it. the thing bitcoin has going for it is a large communit…

That is just an emotionalistic assertion. You aren't interacting with the actual content of the article.

It's literally the exact same arguments from 3 years ago. 3 years ago there were very few real apps/users on ethereum. At that time, ether was mostly a pet rock like bitcoin with smart contracts attached. That's simply not true anymore.

There is ether (the asset) and etheriumn (the chain), while usage of the latter accrues value to the former, the latter is what's important (and not the former). All that matters for these platforms is usage. There are other good level 1's with traction from users/developers (terra/solana specifically).

The idea that there's going to be only 1 blockchain for value transmission or that users really care about highly technical points about decentralization are laughable. People care about the apps, use-cases, and [jpegs of rocks](https://opensea.io/).

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