The Merge • Hacker News Board

Re: The Merge

#51

Post by dotBen » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

eduction wrote: post #37

camjohnson26 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the most knowledgeable people in the space probably have large holdings, since otherwise there’s not much incentive to learn about it.

People don’t need incentives to learn about technologies that solve real problems though. I saw the value in Macs, for example, without ever buying Apple shares, I use AWS without owning Amazon, I learned about Linux without profiting from its spread, etc. Update: My point is simply that if “most knowledgeable people in the space probably have large holdings” as was claimed, this is arguably an indictment of the tech…

They don't but realistically that is the incentive and motivation for many people - including technologists who ultimately decide to use their understanding of the market to leverage capital rather than code or perform a similar technical function.

In your case one could argue that if you saw so much future value in the Mac/Apple ecosystem you missed out significantly by not purchasing Apple stock. Depending on when you made your observation, even a modest investment would have had a significant return over the past 20 years.

I actually use the Amazon example when people tell me how worried they are about Amazon becoming all almighty and taking over all commerce - that if they actually believe that then they should probably buy Amazon stock and use the profits to do something to counter whatever negative effect they perceive.

As a former software engineer and founder now VC what I personally realized is I could have the greatest impact on the industry from leveraging capital around my own industry thesis rather than continue to build it myself. It's all a layer cake.

Re: The Merge

#52

Post by TakeBlaster16 » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:16 PM UTC

randomran01234 wrote: post #46

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that PoW pools are made up of individual miners who are free to go elsewhere if their pool misbehaves. Pools do not have their own mining hardware, and so they have an economic incentive to be well-behaved. If they misbehave, everybody leaves and they vaporize their business overnight. PoS is tyranny of the majority: You cannot take your business elsewhere.

It’s the same with staking. If you aren’t solo staking, you are just delegating to a staking pool. And you can withdraw that and deposit it elsewhere if they do not align with your values.

Again, it is not possible for staking pools to differ on "values". If a validator does not vote with the majority, their funds will be slashed by the protocol.

Re: The Merge

#53

Post by scottiebarnes » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #47

yuan43 wrote: post #34

> Proof of Stake systems (of which they are many in the market already like Solana, Avalanche, etc) are considered more secure because the likelihood of a 51% attack is much lower. I don’t plan to lay out the argument here, but suffice it to say that Ethereum is moving to a consensus mechanism that many consider to be more resistant to attack, making it even more secure than it has been. I don't think so. At best, we…

This wasn't supposed to be an argument about the relative exploitability of the attack-surfaces presented by implementations of the technologies of PoW and PoS consensus systems, though; but rather about the economics inherent in "cornering the market" in PoW vs PoS. PoW and PoS both allow a single party to unilaterally control the network when they're working exactly as intended — just under conditions that are impr…

51% attacks aren't just a single actor dictating blocks, but the threat of a cartel of large stakeholders cooperating to attain 51% of vote power

Re: The Merge

#54

Post by rcthompson » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

kranke155 wrote: post #7

boh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer c…

NFTs work and they allow artists to - make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.

Of all the artists I follow, not a single one has had anything good to say about NFTs. Their only interaction with NFTs has been dozens of scammers fraudulently minting NFTs of all their work, followed by exchanges putting the burden of proof on the artist to show that each individual NFT is fraudulent.

Maybe there's some legitimate business happening in the art NFT space, but if so, it's a drop in an ocean of fraud.

Re: The Merge

#55

Post by kkielhofner » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

Kbelicius wrote: post #32

kranke155 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out. The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself. And want you’re saying is not neces…

> In this particular case - it is better than a standard contract because the previous method of authenticating work is hugely expensive for the artist and has immense gatekeeping. Minting an NFT takes 30 seconds. As you said NFT is just a signature so how do the NFTs solve the problems of authenticating art?

They don't. An example search from my NFT anti-fraud solution:

https://fnftf.io/?results=982ce32629ebcbd7dce30baf2f84adafb5...

So there you have it - dozens of copies of the same art across the same chain and other chains plus dozens of other low-quality "remixes" that don't qualify as an original work. Nothing in the space (other than solutions like mine) do anything to authenticate the content in any form or fashion.

In fact, on FNFTF we make a pretty big deal of searches that only return one result (original and unique content) because it doesn't happen very often:

https://fnftf.io/?results=81cd744ab237b0eb68fbe1702c82db9cdf...

Shameless plug I suppose but there isn't anything else publicly available that shows just how bad and widespread this issue is.

Re: The Merge

#56

Post by flotzam » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #8

No mention of sanctions? It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either: 1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC. or: 2. Refuse to sign these transactions. 2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until th…

> 2b. If > 67% of the network refuses, transactions can be successfully censored.

Similar with PoW. For both PoW and PoS, the proper response is to socially coordinate forking out the censoring block producer majority (like with the Bitcoin UASF that was threatened over much less egregious miner misbehavior). PoS improves on PoW here in two ways:

1. Non-censoring PoS block producers can have a tiny meatspace presence compared to PoW mining operations, which makes it easier to physically evade pro-censorship forces

2. It's more effective to coordinate a direct confiscation of the censoring PoS block producers' on-chain capital investment, compared to making miners' equipment partially obsolete by coordinating an ad-hoc redesign of the PoW algorithm

https://nitter.net/dystopiabreaker/status/156071598642414796...

Re: The Merge

#57

Post by kranke155 » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

Kbelicius wrote: post #32

kranke155 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out. The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself. And want you’re saying is not neces…

> In this particular case - it is better than a standard contract because the previous method of authenticating work is hugely expensive for the artist and has immense gatekeeping. Minting an NFT takes 30 seconds. As you said NFT is just a signature so how do the NFTs solve the problems of authenticating art?

I'm sure what you mean. NFTs allow for a market for digital art, in that there's an immutable ledger where artists can say "I am selling 10 'signed artworks' of this piece". Because the ledger is known to be immutable, and it allows for transactions between users, you have a market where there wasn't one before.

The problem of authenticating art before this, for a digital artist, was that you HAD to have a gallery do it with you in order for it to work. No one trusted anyone, not even the artist, to say that there would only be "10 copies" of that digital artwork, since they couldn't do any follow through if the artist decided to say there were ten copies but sold 10 000. This was an issue with digital art that was previously only solved by the reputation of X art gallery - the art gallery would say - "we certified only 10 copies, and our reputation as a gallery protects this artwork from being certified again".

With NFTs you just do it. The problem was gatekeeping, the need for an "authority" to certify your signatures on digital art, and the process involved. NFTs are a click of a button and a few dollars to mint.

Does that answer your question?

Re: The Merge

#58

Post by manigandham » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

silentsea90 wrote: post #36

kranke155 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The idea of apolitical money is a fantasy” Yannis Varoufakis, London, circa 2017 Either crypto follows the law or it gets banned. IMO this was inevitable.

You present a problem with Proof of Stake as an inevitable run in with the law and/or some folly of the crypto community. That's not very sound logic. I personally believe in apolitical decentralized money winning against fiat which is governed on the whims of central bankers and crony capitalism. Every system where technology brings fairness, power to all, and hard rules wins. This will not be an exception. It is th…

Crypto itself can cross borders as a intangible virtual entity. You cannot. Your physicality means you're bounded by geographical borders to a nation state and thus its laws and regulations.

Re: The Merge

#59

Post by dale_glass » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

kranke155 wrote: post #28

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners and having full open source code. How do you figure? Skilled developers have struggled to efficiently scale an application from one to two rack servers connected with Infiniband, never mind a hodgepodge of heterogeneous hardware and WAN interconnects runn…

I assume something like Moore’s Law applies tbh. I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model? I would say in the next 5 years we’ll start seeing breakthrough apps. Like I said above I don’t expect everything ever to go on chain in the ne…

> I assume something like Moore’s Law applies tbh.

We're nearing the limits of physics already. I do expect hardware to get much faster still, but not forever and not as fast as now.

> I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model?

I think really never. Because the rest of the world doesn't sit idle, and most anything can be done the traditional way.

You could pay huge $$$ to create a smart contract on ETH, or you could get more power than any normal person could afford on the Ethereum blockchain on the AWS EC2 free tier. If you think paying amounts with a few zeroes in them is a sensible thing, then you have far more computing power available.

I think the only reason to use the blockchain is if you really need the blockchain. And the vast majority of computing doesn't. And as we're seeing, the blockchain is very much vulnerable if the world wants to push it around badly enough.

Re: The Merge

#60

Post by kranke155 » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

kkielhofner wrote: post #44

kranke155 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two things don’t cancel each other out. The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself. And want you’re saying is not neces…

My NFT anti-fraud solution has ~195m NFTs indexed and analyzed (everything on Ethereum, Polygon, and Solana). Here's the breakdown of current storage methods across all of them: curl https://match.tovera.com/api/v0/stats/nft/storageMethods [ { "storage": "https", "ratio": "0.39163250000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-08-20T05:55:01.164Z" }, { "storage": "ipfs", "ratio": "0.58654950000000000000", "counted_at": "2022-0…

Thank you for this. The fact that you did this shows that there is a potential for a solution for NFT/art copies. Hopefully markets will begin doing this themselves and stop this plague.