81–90 of 330 posts
> You can only be probabilistically to a high degree (but with zero guarantee) that you have received your funds.
All cryptography depends on it being probabilistically difficult to guess the secret. This is an exceptionally weak criticism of blockchains.
No, blockchains are not the future, they are really the reason why one transaction can happen at a time in the whole world. Even Ethereum 2.0 will have shards which will do away with this anomaly. The only reason flash loans even work with no collateral is because you can be sure nothing else is running on the “world computer” while your transaction runs, so you can roll it back with no risk except gas fees. Vitalik…
Bitcoin has been running non-stop for the past 12 years, used by tens of millions of people,has a market cap of 1 Trillion and all that while protecting the human rights around the world: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ldyy7s/bitcoin_is_... But even if you are clueless enough to think that Bitcoin and blockchain isn't working at least you should appreciate all the breakthroughs in cryptography like Zero Kn…
How much of that usage and market cap is actual usage and how much is financial speculation?
I believe Bitcoin likely started to exponentially take off when the online marketing forums started rallying to put their efforts behind promoting it. Eventually then the VC-finance industrial complex joined in - and mainstream media then has been promoting it as if Bitcoin et al are stocks and a new currency. All the while the army of HODLers is growing - all incentivized to promote Bitcoin et al, and those who speak of a counter-narrative aren't financially incentivize to do so, and actually should fear doing so due to the mob; a partner at a top, international investment firm, Ray Dalio at Blackwater recently said as much - "while those who are against it (which are a few scared souls cowering in a corner)" - in his article "What I Think Of Bitcoin" - https://www.bridgewater.com/research-and-insights/ray-dalio-...
The VC-financially industrial complex with billions have started to jump into the speculation game, the MLM, and with their billions I believe have stared to attempt to invest just enough to offset crashes in price - along with the "army of HODLers" learning to be more obedient and listening to their war mantra of HODL, along with Coinbase likely purposefully engaging in price manipulation by multiple times making their platform unaccessible to users - so those who would impulse sell when the price starts to skyrocket are blocked long enough for them to instead hold; I'm guessing Coinbase also have a certain amount of large buy orders from large institutional investors that they manage, and they use these funds in part to counter a crash from happening.
This same price manipulation happens in the stock market - https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/lg0ial/jim_cramer_e...
I also believe Tesla's recent acquisition of Bitcoin was to seem aligned with the growing mob of HODLers - who you don't want to be maligned with if you want them to speak positively about your product and buy your product, or in reality be less critical of you and your company because you're then financially aligned; Elon Musk recently tweeted "Bitcoin is almost as bs as fiat money" - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1340588909974200321
Unfortunately the world may go mad, greed taking over, regulatory capture occurring where a generally small amount of people could lead to trying to engage most of society in helping realize whatever value Bitcoin et al reaches - unreasonably and unnecessarily transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. It could be the next war to be fought after tyranny is solved - Bitcoin in fact making tyranny easier as you can't implement policy like the Magnitsky Act; it's always a non-response when asking a pro-Bitcoiner to address this question/problem.
I believe an organization needs to be started and funded somehow to put a concerted effort to organize and educate people by creating, compiling, everything necessary - and making whatever easy to understand educational material to go along with it - and to be promoted, along with as a resource for people to reference when they're in discussion with others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just recreated consumer banking.
> I think that's their point. There's a lot of discussion that 'banks will become obsolete with crypto' that forgets that banks are not the currency, they just manage it. If crypto becomes widespread banks will keep on existing, they'll just move to manage cryptocurrencies. > You just recreated consumer banking. While I personally detest the notion of such a model, and things like GME show why that is: I realized tha…
Is this what Gell-Mann amnesia feels like? I happen to be a bit into cryptocurrency, and day after day I see these super basic surface-level takes on blockchain get posted here and even upvoted to the top spot. Are the other popular submissions here, on programming languages, the internet, entrepeneurship and what have you of similar low quality, but I just don't have the experience in those fields to realize it? Thi…
I don't think that's anything particularly unique to HN but is simply a fundamental weakness of the "one forum for all subjects" approach that HN takes contra Reddit.
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Hundreds of PoW altcoins disagree. PoS is not a coin distribution method either.
Hundreds of PoW altcoins are doomed: https://www.crypto51.app
1) Scalability
For now, the big advance is a layer-2 approach called "rollups," several of which are in production already and able to handle several thousand transactions per second. Zkrollups do that without compromising security assumptions at all, but aren't quite to the point of handling arbitrary smart contracts. Optimistic rollups can handle arbitrary contracts but require a delay for funds withdrawal since they rely on fraud proofs.
About a year from now, data sharding will multiply rollup capacity by 23X. [1]
2) Key management
Vitalik agrees on this point and advocates social recovery wallets, where your friends and/or service providers give you some backup. Two popular wallets already implement this. [2]
3) Contract security
This one is near and dear to my heart since I've worked as a contract auditor. It's still a problem but less so if best practices are followed, and projects which did so are holding vast sums without issues.
Of the two examples they mentioned, TheDAO happened when Ethereum was less than a year old and nobody had realized the reentrance issue; also it was nasty, convoluted code, and didn't have a thorough public audit. Parity actually had two problems: they changed their wallet, made a simple mistake, and it slipped through because they didn't bother getting a new audit. That enabled several large thefts. Then they made another change to fix that, still didn't get a new audit, made another simple mistake, and that resulted in frozen funds. Both mistakes would probably have been caught by any decent auditor.
As usual, keeping the code simple and straightforward helps a lot.
4) Probabilistic consensus
The new proof-of-stake chain is probabilistic initially but every six minutes it actually finalizes. At that point transactions cannot be reversed without destroying 2/3 of staked ETH. Currently the staked ETH totals $5 billion.
However, so far this is running on the side, with real ETH but not actually running smart contracts or transferring ETH around. It will be about a year before rest of Ethereum migrates to it.
5) Privacy
Zksnarks are able to help here and Ethereum is getting better at implementing them efficiently, but privacy is not in wide use yet, partly because of gas costs. EY has done a lot of work on implementing privacy in zkrollups for corporate transactions on the public chain.
6) Price volatility
For people unwilling to deal with volatility, there are stablecoins on Ethereum, some implemented as derivatives over ETH.
I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just recreated consumer banking.
> I think that's their point. There's a lot of discussion that 'banks will become obsolete with crypto' that forgets that banks are not the currency, they just manage it. If crypto becomes widespread banks will keep on existing, they'll just move to manage cryptocurrencies. > You just recreated consumer banking. While I personally detest the notion of such a model, and things like GME show why that is: I realized tha…
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
... and then they buy bitcoin
Also noticed the same in regards to kubernetes, only in the last six months has it become "acceptable", and yet it is everywhere and used for everything. Just plain ignorance. But, as the above quote tries to show, lightly, eventually Bitcoin wins.
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> "The only good use cases that come to mind is if there is some particular reason for you to evade the conventional and easier systems of communication and storage." * Nailed it * I've long said the killer app for blockchain already exists: international money laundering and untraceable transfers. This also happens to be the precise use case where folks want to "evade conventional and easier systems".
Until you need international remittances or business payments. Then, Crypto at its worst is far better than international Wire Transfers, etc.
Let’s say I’m invoicing someone abroad for $100k USD.
Today they send me a wire transfer. It costs about 25 USD (fixed fee, but in this case 0.025% of the transaction, i.e. negligible) and normally completes the same day.
The payment is made in the currency of my invoice, so I’m guaranteed to receive the right amount. (Any currency exchange is the sender’s responsibility. But a lot of companies maintain accounts in various currencies, so they probably have USD at hand.)
How does crypto payment improve anything here? Exchanges just add extra steps. The extreme volatility of Bitcoin means that, by the time an exchange is processing my $100k withdrawal, it might be worth $90k. It’s not a useful currency if it goes up and down 10% in a day.