Calling miners “the working class” is a misleading label no doubt chosen to instill sympathy. By that measure, factory owners in the industrial revolution were the working class.
The Problem with Ethereum
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Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#92There's plenty wrong with Ethereum, but casting miners as 'the working class' is a flawed analogy. The mercantile class would be closer to the mark. Notably, their hashing power is based in real world economic power and they extract an annuity from capital expenditure on mining operations and hardware.
I also question whether miners are really providing the labour power, as you might expect the working class to do. They build the roads and keep the lights on but the means of production of value is (or ought to be) the services provided by those writing functionality that makes the network useful, i.e. the smart contract writers. Whether one thinks smart contracts on Ethereum have any value is another question but that was at least the vision.
A move to proof-of-stake does not remove the role of miners/validators. Validators will still earn a reward from validating blocks. So it's not as if this 'class' is being disenfranchised totally.
Finally the social class analogy entails disjointness of classes, this is certainly not the case for miners, many of whom are major token holders, and some of whom are involved in governance (of course by miners we are taking about the humans controlling the mining rigs not the computers themselves)
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#93The great part about cryptocurrency is that if you don’t want it, don’t buy it - don’t read about it - don’t do anything. It is a purely voluntary system. If you want to avoid US Dollars, it’s essentially impossible for most people. There is no problem with Ethereum.
Except miners slurping up the entire limited GPU supply means I haven't been able to afford a proper graphics card for about 3 years now.
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#94"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…
There is nothing wrong with technical solutions to social problems per se. For example, sovereigns tend to spy on their citizenry, and the technical solutions of cryptography and steganography help mitigate that, albeit in a limited way.
The problem with Bitcoin at al is that they propose wrong solutions to ill defined social problems. Absolutely no real macroeconomic insight was put in the initial bitcoin halving block reward. Later adopters invested it with magic ability to forever stop "inflation", ill defined as taxation through monetary expansion. What resulted was a highly speculative asset that even 10 years later shows no signs of macrostability and is prone to losing 50% of its value in a single trading day. The social costs of using such a monetary unit day to day would be orders of magnitude higher than any reasonable inflation.
Another ill defined problem was financial privacy. In most cryptos, there is no way to socially cooperate to reliably limit financial privacy of bad players. What you get is an excelent system for teleporting a wad of cash across borders - if you can stomach the volatility. And it just so happens there is a substantial "market" that requires this laundry service and would gladly pay 10% or so to transform illicit gains into "crypto investements".
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#95> By burning the working class’ money, the ruling class and wealthy class end up with a larger piece of the overall pie. It’s ingenious. Evil, but ingenious.
The arguments in the article would have carried more weight without the loaded language. Miners are more like banks in a fiat system rather than 'working class'. Pay cuts for middle-men means increase in efficiency of the system. Very evil indeed.
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#96Who the hell cares.
Crypto people were warned repeatedly, since 2017 (and arguably even sooner), that this is all a scam and they should not put their money there.
They ignored those messages for years, put the money there anyway (because the number goes up), so, tough luck.
Articles "network XY is more decentralized than network YZ" are boring.
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (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. How stagnated is Bitcoin development? Yeah it is not progressing super fast, but I think it is still progressing. Taproot has been accepted by miners and will be activated this year. Improvements are being done. As Bitcoin is the biggest crypto by market gap, I th…
True, Taproot is looking promising. Yet, it's the only major change since 2017, I don't think they're moving fast enough. And what's the next major improvement on the cards for Bitcoin after Taproot? I haven't heard much, and that is worrying in and of itself IMO.
I'm not sure we should treat the base money of the internet the same way we do tech startups - to "move fast and break things". I would like to know that my BTC is stored in a network backed by code that is secure with slow and steady progress.
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#98I 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…
IPFS isn't connected to Ethereum as far as I know.
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#99"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…
Also, humans or not, in any given system, there will be people in position to analyze and take advantage of subtle / indirect / emergent effect of that system. Be it better brains, more funding to try strategies, it will happen.
Is that a bad thing? Maybe that's how systems become more efficient.
Re: The Problem with Ethereum
#100> working class — a group that does the work the community needs to operate it. It would be more correct to call miners a Merchant Class. They exploit capital to make profit. Like merchants of old, they take risks that regulations (real-world and the "ruling class") won't impede profit. Hardware gets outdated quickly as mining difficulty rises, so a timely exit is not difficult - wait until cards die, or offload them…
> Bitcoin has also forked, many times.
This is a false comparison.
The bitcoin blockchain maintains the original monetary policy of bitcoin, which is effectively set in stone.
That is not true of Ethereum, and that is the purported problem with Ethereum.