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The Problem with Ethereum

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Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#61

Post by latchkey »

Sevii wrote: post #12

I emphasize with the arguments here but I differ in my conclusion for two reasons. 1. I don't own just Ethereum, its not a boat that I'm riding in, its one of many gambles I'm making. 2. The Ethereum network has generated a ton of really good stuff (Smart Contracts, DEFI, NFTS, IPFS, ENS, etc) despite whatever governance problems it has. Cryptocurrencies are far from mature. There is no guarantee eth and btc will sti…

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.

Bitcoiners use the phrase: "The next bitcoin is bitcoin."

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#62

Post by sarah180 »

There are good points here, but I think analogizing the situation into a class struggle within a society is both confusing and specious. Ethereum is not a civilization: it's a piece of FinTech.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#63

Post by a-dub »

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…

it's funny that this appeared today. i've recently been musing about whether or not a technical and political migration of the bitcoin ecosystem from proof of work to a consensus model that simulates the proof of work economy in a clean way, complete with a socio-economic solution that does not leave miners and their associated/secondary economy out in the cold, could be an idealized model for migrating the global economy off of fossil fuels.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#64

Post by latchkey »

Tenoke wrote: post #53
latchkey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all. There was never any real consensus among miners on this front. As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics. The miners who I watched were just kind of bandwagon on the theme of "wait, I'll earn less cause you're burning my fees"? Which in reality isn't entirely the case (price and usage have gone up, along with the lack of wallet support).

The Community calls didn't reach agreement with miners, and the fact that they kept protesting it is why the Ethereum Foundation decided to move the ETH 2 timeline forward. https://cryptobriefing.com/ethereum-miners-protesting-eip-15... >As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics. I don't know what mechanics you think others didn't understand. Your profitability has dro…

LOL! Pretty sure those community calls did not include ALL miners. With regards to the rest, it is all political theater.

The mechanics I'm referring to are in the 50+ page document that I read, that I'm sure most people (miners) are not even aware of: https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackm...

As for profitability changes, that's almost impossible to measure right now. There is too many variables. One is that there isn't any wallet support for 1559 yet (MM came out today and is apparently, um, lacking). People are still over paying for transactions. Difficulty + price changes + pool luck + changes in hardware stability also make things nearly impossible to track accurately. I have a margin of error, but it doesn't look too bad right now actually.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#65

Post by chrisco255 »

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.

Why is it wrong? Ethereum has had the plan to move to proof of stake for years, and the purpose of the network is to serve its users not to enrich miners. We pay miners for security. That's great, but if we find a cheaper way to do security, there's nothing wrong with choosing a different security solution.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#66

Post by kristofferR »

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…

(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 development model, where everyone can participate, but core devs have the final say. However, decentralized governance may be something they implement in the future.

[*] Slightly harsh, see comments below.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#67

Post by yunohn »

kristofferR wrote: post #66
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…

(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…

> some cryptos like Tezos are governed quite decentralized in many ways.

Whenever crypto enthusiasts tell me about DeFi governance, I get excited about the possibilities.

Then, I actually take a look at some of the group decisions, and literally all of them are crypto/coin-related, and don’t deal with any /real/ or human problems…

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#68

Post by chrisco255 »

Apofis wrote: post #55

The only value argument of Etherium over Bitcoin is that you can have computation on the blockchain, which is a joke when you consider AWS and Azure exists. The rest are delusional details.

Could you explain precisely, how you might build a $350 billion plausibly neutral, open source, non-gated, cryptographically secure blockchain and smart contract platform with 100% uptime over 6 years on AWS and Azure?

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#69

Post by BLKNSLVR »

a-dub wrote: post #63
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…

it's funny that this appeared today. i've recently been musing about whether or not a technical and political migration of the bitcoin ecosystem from proof of work to a consensus model that simulates the proof of work economy in a clean way, complete with a socio-economic solution that does not leave miners and their associated/secondary economy out in the cold, could be an idealized model for migrating the global ec…

There are a number of articles claiming various percentages of Bitcoin mining from renewables, but this is probably the most balanced quote:

"Commonly cited estimates range from 39% to 73% renewable energy. Jesse Morris, CEO of non-profit Energy Web says most estimates find 20% to 50% of bitcoin is powered by renewable energy, but all available numbers are based on self-reported data, which is unverifiable. 30 June 2021"

My inner optimist is satisfied that the renewable percentage is constantly growing.

Re: The Problem with Ethereum

#70

Post by ahdeanz »

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…

Absolutely, not to mention Eth just rolled out a major update last week. This rambling, bizarre article boils down to a few very basic, extremely played out arguments.

Argument 1: Proof of stake concentrates wealth more than proof of work.

You can make that argument, but POS advocates have for a long time argued that proof of work mining has more economies of scale than proof of stake and therefore the opposite is actually true. Equating proof of work miners to the working class & stakers or developers as wealthy elites or rulers is so massively cringe it's tough to even read.

Argument 2: Ethereum is in active development, is planning to switch to proof of stake, has things like difficulty bombs, and therefore is somehow dishonest.

Decentralized blockchain communities come to consensus around different values and philosophies. Eth has for a long time been a community which values consistent iteration and improvement around fundamental aspects of the protocol. The transition to proof of stake has been known for years and years. There's nothing dishonest about any of this. If anything the community has been asking for faster iteration to solve high transaction fees and improve usability. Bitcoin's development stagnation works fine for bitcoin. Ethereum is clearly making the right move in continuing to improve the base protocol. Which as you mention is a huge, extremely complicated undertaking.

The article goes on to some cognitive dissonance about how Ethereum doesn't deliver on promises despite the fact that it just delivered a major protocol update last week... might as well throw in the dao hack and icos and whatever else in there and see if anything sticks. I guess with nothing to develop or build, bitcoin maxi's have a lot of time to ramble incoherently about Ethereum. And they probably always will.

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