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The Problem with Ethereum

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Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#301

Post by everfree »

javert wrote: post #300
everfree wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I remember using Bitcoin to buy coffee in town back in the day (2014, 2015-ish). All the retailers stopped accepting it as payment due to the results of the scaling debate. Steam, WordPress, Microsoft and others. If its current design under the block size limit was clear to you, it very much wasn't clear to me back then.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#302

Post by Tepix »

jkhdigital wrote: post #235
Tepix wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is what bitcoin is supposed to be - sound money. Bitcoin can't be used as money in most cases as transactions are too expensive and slow. It has failed its primary function. Instead of doing something about it, the notion of using bitcoin like money has been abandonded and it's merely a " store of value ". That's until people stop valuing it.

Is cash money? What percentage of your transactions are settled in cash? Money and payment settlement systems are not the same thing, although you could be forgiven for believing that. I use a credit card for 99% of my transaction volume, and credit cards are not money. The fact that the notional value of the transaction is denominated in dollars doesn't mean I am actually using dollars as the medium of exchange--the…

Yes, cash is money and a large percentage of my transactions are settled in cash (currently with covid the percentage is a bit lower).

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#303

Post by Tepix »

mandmandam wrote: post #170
Tepix wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners are not doing any useful work is incorrect, they are securing the system.

The system does not need to be secured in a way that burns the energy of Argentina. There are networks running right now that use the energy of a windmill to provide secure transactions, and more of them, processed in under a second, with no fee at all. That's not vaporware; that's current reality. All Bitcoin miners are doing is perpetuating a system that has been very groundbreaking but is now obsolete in every way…

I agree that what they are doing is highly inefficient, however they are doing it.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#304

Post by inter_netuser »

namlem wrote: post #247
dash2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except nuclear fusion isn't 30 years away anymore. A ton of progress has been made in plasma physics. There's a good chance we'll see an energy-positive reactor by the end of this decade.

HB11?

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#305

Post by h0l0cube »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #297
h0l0cube wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure the GPUs could be reused for some other purpose that generates as much value. Perhaps another alt-coin is the best way to redeploy this resources

> I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.

That's a fair point

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#306

Post by dash2 »

lottin wrote: post #256
dash2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do not. Direct democracy, as practiced by Athens, would be a better example. Worked OK for Athens for a while. Athens had probably 30,000 citizens. No modern state has tried replacing representative democracy with direct democracy, for reasons nicely explained by Benjamin Constant (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-a...).

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#307

Post by javert »

whitepaint wrote: post #124
javert wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vitalik is a saint in comparison to Hoskinson, but that doesn't mean Ethereum is sound money. It is what it is; lots of good innovation there, but sound money, it is not.

None of the cryptos are sound money ("money not liable to sudden appreciation or depreciation in value") except stablecoins on Ethereum. Bitcoin can easily lose 80% of its value in a month and no one would be surprised. Bitcoin is the biggest speculative bubble of all time. It absolutely has no utility (imagine if Bitcoin disappeared now - what would the world lose?). The actual real exciting stuff regarding the cryp…

Bitcoin can be sound money after the price stabilizes, which will probably take decades if it ever happens. Nothing else in the world ever could be sound money except commodity money, like gold, but I'd argue that bitcoin is better.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#308

Post by javert »

everfree wrote: post #301
javert wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember using Bitcoin to buy coffee in town back in the day (2014, 2015-ish). All the retailers stopped accepting it as payment due to the results of the scaling debate. Steam, WordPress, Microsoft and others. If its current design under the block size limit was clear to you, it very much wasn't clear to me back then.

Just making blocks bigger isn't enough to scale bitcoin to Visa levels, so making on-chain bitcoin payments work for small payments was never on the table.

It would have required a radical redesign of bitcoin to even have a chance of success, and that has always been off the table and has been left for new, experimental digital currencies.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#309

Post by revnode »

meowface wrote: post #270
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The article feels a bit like it's salty about a very complex software project behaving like a very complex software project. My understanding of the changing of the rules "as you go" is that it's based on the reality being faced by the system. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is simultaneously one of it's strengths and one of its weaknesses, and Ethereum has chosen to move from PoW to PoS because of the belief that it…

>Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Take off the rose-coloured glasses, "your community" isn't sunshine and roses either. I think this is unfair. These are splinter communities. It's like critiquing Ethereum's community by pointing at Ethereum Classic and Binance Smart Chain. >Personally, I think PoW may be what brings Bitcoin down in the long-term. I pretty much agree with this part. I think it'll p…

> It's like critiquing Ethereum's community by pointing at Ethereum Classic

That's exactly what the article did.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#310

Post by dcow »

latchkey wrote: post #296
dcow wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disks can handle 1 entire disk write no problem. Not sure what disks you're thinking of...
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