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The Problem with Ethereum

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Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#291

Post by everfree »

dcow wrote: post #253
latchkey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> File coin has structural problems like you cant mine filecoin without first buying filecoin to stake

Why do you consider this a structural problem?

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#292

Post by ineptech »

everfree wrote: post #288
ineptech wrote: post #21

This is overlong and pretty florid, but its conclusion (that a long record of forked changes, each being good for big ETH holders but bad for miners, is roughly equivalent to the self-dealing of wealthy insiders in the traditional financial world) doesn't seem wrong.

Miners are contractors. They have no stake in Ethereum's long-term success unless they become ETH holders as well. Ether's price has risen exponentially. It doesn't make sense (and isn't necessary) to pay miners exponentially higher amounts of money to do the same job, thus the issuance reductions.

Making sense isn't equivalent to being justifiable. Imagine a FAANG telling their devs, "We're reducing your options, but that's okay because our stock price has gone up."

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#293

Post by baby »

amarant wrote: post #136

A lot of comments here criticise the analogies made in the post. While the criticism might be correct, I feel this is like missing the forest because of the trees.. Etherium, and most crypto-currencies for that matter, were initially made to fix a broken financial system, where banks unjustly control too much wealth, and changes the rules so that they will always control too much wealth. Etherium does not fix this, i…

It’s hard to listen to the opinion of someone who can’t even spell Ethereum.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#294

Post by everfree »

ineptech wrote: post #292
everfree wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners are contractors. They have no stake in Ethereum's long-term success unless they become ETH holders as well. Ether's price has risen exponentially. It doesn't make sense (and isn't necessary) to pay miners exponentially higher amounts of money to do the same job, thus the issuance reductions.

Making sense isn't equivalent to being justifiable. Imagine a FAANG telling their devs, "We're reducing your options, but that's okay because our stock price has gone up."

I don't see any inherent moral issue with writing an employment contract that way. Of course as a developer, I would heavily discount the value of options designed to work like that - which Ethereum miners should have been doing this whole time.

Software development is a pretty free market as far as labor markets go. If a developer doesn't like the terms of the contract they're offered, they can bail and work somewhere else.

With Ethereum, their "Minimum Necessary Issuance" social contract has been very clear in the docs since the beginning of the project.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#295

Post by latchkey »

sanderjd wrote: post #279
latchkey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years ago I didn't think bitcoin would be here today. Yet, here we are. If we waited for everything to be mature, then we wouldn't have used web browsers in the early days. I remember when people were afraid to put a credit card into a website. Bitcoin and ETH won't get replaced for the same reasons we ended up with Hacker News, Facebook, Google, Apple, Ebay, Amazon... network effects are amazingly strong. Bitcoin…

It's hard to know when something is Facebook, Google, Apple, or Amazon vs. when it's MySpace, AOL, Palm, or pets.com!

If you put it that way, then that explains all of the failures before bitcoin, of which there were many 'digital cash' attempts.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#296

Post by latchkey »

dcow wrote: post #253
latchkey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't use filecoin (or bitcoin, or eth or anything else really) without buying some too. That's not a structural problem.

If you fill disks full of junk, you're increasing the write wear on those disks. Despite the rumors, GPUs don't just wear out.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#297

Post by Dylan16807 »

h0l0cube wrote: post #226
Dylan16807 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's fair that if you've purchased specialized mining equipment, you expect the ROI you were promised. Doesn't seem strange. * It uses GPUs. * ROI in terms of ethereum is basically irrelevant. Real ROI depends on the bouncy crazy chart. * Was there not enough warning before the changes?

> It uses GPUs. Many miners buy purpose built servers for crypto mining. > Was there not enough warning before the changes? That's the main plaint of the article, and reiterated multiple times. The article claims that the prices was dropped with 2 of the forks, each time it was promised (including at the very beginning) that changes would never be made. Each fork seemed to be of gain to the people who were part of th…

Almost all the value in those servers is the GPUs.

I didn't ask whether promises were eventually broken, I asked how long the warning was.

Also if we talk about the promises, I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#298

Post by mandmandam »

jkhdigital wrote: post #233
mandmandam wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything has tradeoffs. There's no 'objective' better. Yes there is. Every chess move has advantages and disadvantages, yes. But some are objectively better . Every algorithm has advantages and disadvantages. But some are objectively better . Believing that nothing can be objectively better than Bitcoin, and calling people who disagree delusional, is less than useful.

Chess is an abstract game in a tightly bounded universe. Economics (which includes monetary economics) is concerned with open systems in the real world. The two are not even remotely comparable. You might benefit--expand your mind--by reading some classical economists' thoughts on such things.

We are not just talking about a small difference between BTC and newer gen crpyto.

I've stated numbers above.

While I appreciate the hilarity of invoking classical economics to justify vague Bitcoin maximalism, we are talking about something 6 million times more energy efficient, with infinitely lower fees, and well over a thousand times faster. It's objectively better on every technical front.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#299

Post by tablespoon »

hamburgerwah wrote: post #26

Ethereum is and has always been the toy of Vitalik Buterin and his cronies. They control roughly 64% of all ETH. Everyone else is just share cropping suckers.

> Ethereum is and has always been the toy of Vitalik Buterin and his cronies. They control roughly 64% of all ETH. Everyone else is just share cropping suckers.

But they told me crypto would free us from centralized control! /s

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#300

Post by javert »

everfree wrote: post #289
javert wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has chosen consistency with its original principles over "innovation." A good choice, in my book. What we should think of as constituting sound money has not changed since 2008. That is what bitcoin is supposed to be - sound money. Ethereum is supposed to be something else - and it makes sense for Ethereum to "innovate" much more than bitcoin does.

> Bitcoin has chosen consistency with its original principles Bitcoin was originally invented as a "peer to peer electronic cash system". The fees have made it impossible to use it as such for quite some time.

Despite the tagline from the whitepaper, it's always been clear to me that bitcoin was an Austrian-style sound money system and could not scale to be a network for small payments. I think bitcoin has remained consistent with the original vision and design.
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