Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 378 posts

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#91

Post by int_19h »

beefield wrote: post #49

Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.

Illegal transactions sound like a perfectly good use case to me, considering the laws that so many people have to contend with.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#92

Post by mamon »

lawn wrote: post #74
cyphar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excluding the transaction fees problem you mentioned (which cryptocurrencies also have -- while it might not be 4% it's definitely not 0%), all of the uses you listed are really just one use-case -- uncensorable transactions. Don't get me wrong, that's a very good feature of cryptocurrencies (assuming that you have the ability to transform crypto back to real money on the other end), but you should be aware that your…

Good point. I'd say anonymous payments is a little different from being uncensorable though. You'll stay anonymous even after the payment has gone through. As for transaction fees, if we exclude Bitcoin which has really high fees, cryptocurrency fees are very small and almost negligible.[0] Getting money out of the country is always relative. Even with Bitcoin's volatility it's much preferred to losing all your money…

>> As for transaction fees, if we exclude Bitcoin which has really high fees, cryptocurrency fees are very small and almost negligible.[0]

That's probably because their popularity among users is also negligible. Problem with cryptocurrencess is that they don't scale well, with increased transaction volumes the fees and processing times also tend to rise until network's hashing power catches up.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#94

Post by meirdavis »

tfha wrote: post #39
spir wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phase 0 of Ethereum v2 arrives in Q1 2020. Coming since 2014 but finally arriving :) Proof of stake reduces the issuance of new ETH to pay for the cost of securing the network. It's cheaper than paying miners. And anybody can buy ETH to stake so it's more egalitarian than mining which requires economies of scale in hardware and electricity.

Doesn't phase 0 exclude the ability to transfer money? The whole point of a "currency"???

Correct. Phase 0 isn't useful by itself and phase 1 isn't that useful either. Phase 2 is when people can actually start using ETH2 instead of ETH1.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#95

Post by meirdavis »

jdnenej wrote: post #12
rsynnott wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that’s been coming any day now since about 2014. And seems like a TERRIBLE idea, anyway. The rich get richer, built right into the system!

PoW is exactly the same. The rich can afford the most hardware and electicity. PoS just short circuits the burning power step. It's also the same as bank interest.

PoW provides significant economies of scale for those with lots of scale and makes mining with a single GPU a waste of time. PoS doesn't offer much economies of scale at all as the main cost is the ETH, so it's much fairer to smaller validators.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#96

Post by lawn »

mamon wrote: post #92
lawn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I'd say anonymous payments is a little different from being uncensorable though. You'll stay anonymous even after the payment has gone through. As for transaction fees, if we exclude Bitcoin which has really high fees, cryptocurrency fees are very small and almost negligible.[0] Getting money out of the country is always relative. Even with Bitcoin's volatility it's much preferred to losing all your money…

>> As for transaction fees, if we exclude Bitcoin which has really high fees, cryptocurrency fees are very small and almost negligible.[0] That's probably because their popularity among users is also negligible. Problem with cryptocurrencess is that they don't scale well, with increased transaction volumes the fees and processing times also tend to rise until network's hashing power catches up.

Not exactly. Fees are high in Bitcoin because they want it to be. Bitcoin Cash could for example handle at least 20x of transaction throughput, with the same low fees.

Of course scaling is difficult. But Bitcoin isn't a good example of that.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#98

Post by skohan »

wlesieutre wrote: post #56
hodder wrote: post #8

The biggest problem is actual uptake for real transactions, as opposed to speculation and black markets. The 2 biggest barriers to be solved are: -lack of trust/ease of use for the layman -volatility These problems may or may not sort themselves out with time.

Even if I could use it for regular transactions, I’d still need a reason to want to. If the justification is “you don’t need to pay credit processing fees” then things would have to be priced cheaper. But I think you’d have to pay me more than the credit card fee to give up the ability to do chargebacks for a lot of online transactions. Maybe I’d use it for making donations where I’m not expecting anything back from…

I think there are some use cases where it makes sense. For instance, I have somewhat of a split life between the US and Europe, and I really wanted cryptocurrency to succeed as a cheap way of moving money between currencies.

I played around with bitcoin a bit in 2015, and it back then it was a pretty good experience. Transactions were quick and cheap. The problem is it seems to have gotten less usable in almost every way since then.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#100

Post by buboard »

camdenlock wrote: post #63
snitko wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain the mechanism by which people who invest can exercise their rights as stakeholders, receive dividends etc? Who's to enforce they actually own anything? What's stopping this project from taking all the money and producing nothing (which is exactly what happened with pretty much every ICO out there)?

As far as I understand it, all that matters is the logic of the smart contract code, and possession of private keys. Humans are removed completely from the process. If you own the private key involved in a transaction, then that is the guarantee you’re looking for. All that’s left is to examine the smart contract code in order to figure out what sort of contract to which you’re now a cryptographically-guaranteed part…

> Humans are removed completely from the process

Do you have an example of an organization that works this way, 100% automated? It's hard to think of a system that can be 100% foolproof, there is always someone somewhere that has to trigger something manually, and that 's the weak spot.

Post reply on HN