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The Merge

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Re: The Merge

#61

Post by kranke155 »

rcthompson wrote: post #54
kranke155 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's huge amounts of legitimate business happening in NFTs. I would find it hard to imagine an argument that Beeple's huge sale was somehow not legitimate.

I'm hoping a technical solution appears soon for fraud. NFT fraud is no different from a person on the street doing a high quality print of someone else's artwork, and unlike that situation, a technical solution for NFT fraud is conceivable.

Re: The Merge

#62

Post by dale_glass »

kranke155 wrote: post #49
te_chris wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decoupling of the art and the signature??? Do you read what you write before you write it? There’s a reason NFTs are easy and gallery placements are hard: one has value

people are making millions of dollars from NFTs, but sure. You're the determiner for what has value in the world.

The NFT market has been briefly popular and since then has cratered. Also there's a huge amount of wash trading, so most of that activity isn't even real.

Re: The Merge

#63

Post by derefr »

scottiebarnes wrote: post #53
derefr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, and? This is orthogonal to PoW vs PoS. In either case, you can treat the resulting cartel as "a single party" for purposes of modelling them.

It's also not really a scenario worth considering.

In order to cooperate, the miners/validators need to have full alignment on their goals. Which is very unlikely for Sybil attacks, which almost always destroy systemic economic value — including the value held by the attackers. You might be able to find e.g. a government who wants to do a Sybil attack to accomplish goal X, and are willing to burn down $N billion dollars of their own staked assets to do so; but can you find a bunch of other governments or large corporations who also want to accomplish that same goal X more than they want their own stake-value? And who can be trusted to coordinate and not leak the plan?

A Sybil attack is basically like a bank heist where the attacker(s) have to pull up to the bank in their own personal aircraft carriers (destroying said aircraft carriers in the process, from the hull damage of sliding along several city streets), without anyone realizing they're coming. You can maybe theoretically do it as one entity with full internal goal-alignment. It's much harder to do it as multiple entities.

Re: The Merge

#64

Post by dataangel »

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…

Is your career in a field where learning any of those things is useful? That's still a financial incentive.

Re: The Merge

#65

Post by scottiebarnes »

derefr wrote: post #63
scottiebarnes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, and? This is orthogonal to PoW vs PoS. In either case, you can treat the resulting cartel as "a single party" for purposes of modelling them. It's also not really a scenario worth considering. In order to cooperate, the miners/validators need to have full alignment on their goals. Which is very unlikely for Sybil attacks, which almost always destroy systemic economic value — including the value held by the attac…

One relevant question is which system allows for the pooling of resources easier. In PoW you have mining pools, and a member changing pools is trivial as changing an address. In PoS you have large organizations like Coinbase running staking for users. Don't know how withdrawls will work, but that could be a very significant amount of eth. Coinbase would have to vote a certain way to comply with laws.

Re: The Merge

#66

Post by kranke155 »

dale_glass wrote: post #59
kranke155 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mostly everything can be done in the traditional way - and much faster indeed. The point of blockchain is a superior social solution, not technical.

I agree with you we will use blockchain where it’s necessary, but I suspect that’s a decent percentage of our future digital world.

Re: The Merge

#67

Post by RandomLensman »

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…

It's fine to want a different society/policies, but you need to expand on how that new society should look like then: How would sanctions work, for example? Or if there are none, will there be other means of defense/offense? Who would set the rules of the monetary system and what would give legitimacy to those rule setters? How to move from the old system to the new without (too much) disruption? ...

The endings of proper monarchies weren't always simple and nice events - if that is the magnitude of change you have in mind.

Re: The Merge

#68

Post by 0x64 »

globalreset wrote: post #29
randomran01234 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was not an issue with the old proof of work scheme. Censorship of transactions because of OFAC is already happening in PoW mining. https://twitter.com/takenstheorem/status/1560690035955011585...

Except in in PoW it only means delayed transactions, because only one miner has to "sign off" the block - everyone else accept it passively. A single miner, even with 0.1% mining power is enough to keep the network censorship resistant. In PoS majority of validators has to actively approve a block containing "illegal" transactions, leading to permanent censorship. The exact interpretation of validation vs mining resp…

You are wrong about the majority of validators having to approve a certain transaction for them to be included. Even if 80 % of the network were censoring, those transactions would, on average, make it into every fifth block.

Re: The Merge

#69

Post by dale_glass »

kranke155 wrote: post #57
Kbelicius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

No, you can't. Anybody can go right now and mint their own series of BAYC or any artwork they want. The blockchain will allow it. It won't even care if you mint it against the exact same data, because as far as I know nothing in the blockchain cares that there's more than one NFT pointing to the same URL, or pointing to an URL that resolves to content bit-by-bit identical to something somebody else already minted.

The only guarantee you can have is an extremely weak one, in the form of "this precise collection, with this precise unique ID is set in stone". That's not going to stop anybody from creating another one 5 minutes later.

Re: The Merge

#70

Post by randomran01234 »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #52
randomran01234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trying to understand how this differs in practice. Anyone delegating to a staking pool is forced into their values. Ethermine recently started blocking OFAC transactions, so does the majority of miners in that pool agree with this? If so, what is the defence against censorship in this scenario except for some to exit the pool and use another that aligns with their values?
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