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The Merge

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Re: The Merge

#91

Post by kranke155 »

jjulius wrote: post #71
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.

>... easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art... Hi. Artist here. I have yet to actually see any example of this occurring with a piece of NFT art. Do you have an example of an NFT that is actively collecting royalties for the artist via resale?

Most markets allow you to set royalties for your NFT. I know Versum, Hic et Nunc, pretty sure Opensea. Almost certainly Foundation and Nifty and all the others must do it too?

Re: The Merge

#92

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #8

No mention of sanctions? It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either: 1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC. or: 2. Refuse to sign these transactions. 2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until th…

Where is the evidence that a validator signing transactions invites the wrath if OFAC?

Re: The Merge

#93

Post by rufusroflpunch »

The idea that Proof of Stake is more secure against attack is beyond absurd, frankly. However you feel about the energy usage of proof of work consensus mechanisms, they are far more resistant to attack and centralization.

Re: The Merge

#94

Post by rufusroflpunch »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #92
TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #8

No mention of sanctions? It's estimated that ~50% of staked value is held by US companies. These companies are going to have to make an impossible choice. Either: 1. Sign transactions coming from the sanctioned addresses, inviting the wrath of OFAC. or: 2. Refuse to sign these transactions. 2a. If between 33% and 66% of the network refuses, the network will penalize dissenters by slashing their staked coins, until th…

Where is the evidence that a validator signing transactions invites the wrath if OFAC?

Do you really think they wouldn’t turn they screw when the time came?

Re: The Merge

#95

Post by paulgb »

rufusroflpunch wrote: post #93

The idea that Proof of Stake is more secure against attack is beyond absurd, frankly. However you feel about the energy usage of proof of work consensus mechanisms, they are far more resistant to attack and centralization.

I agree that it's absurd today, but how many bitcoin halvings until it isn't? When people talk about the security of bitcoin, there's a tendency to pretend that the network's security isn't 98% subsidized by a diminishing pool of unminted bitcoin.

Re: The Merge

#96

Post by wanderingbort »

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…

I can only speak for myself but I built software in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space for about 5 years before I held any as an investment.

For me, the incentive was to learn about the tech for the sake of the tech. I actually wasn’t a believer in cryptocurrency as a long term useful concept. I was building into spaces that would benefit from immutability and transparency where accountability was low (high risk businesses and government transparency)

Really, it is something independent of the tech that allowed me to turn a corner on cryptocurrency. I accepted that large groups of believers can “create” value based on nothing but their shared willingness to continue to believe.

Bitcoin and Ethereum have such a critical mass of believers IMO. I wasn’t sure that the tech stack would live up to the hype but I was no longer worried that the price would drop to zero.

Re: The Merge

#97

Post by nostrademons »

manigandham wrote: post #58
silentsea90 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Crypto itself can cross borders as a intangible virtual entity. You cannot. Your physicality means you're bounded by geographical borders to a nation state and thus its laws and regulations.

That assumes that people are the entities that the economy optimizes for, which hasn't been true for 10,000 years or so. People are disposable to capitalism - there are 7.7 billion of us, which makes individual humans about as significant to the economy as individual neurons are to consciousness. As long as there exist some humans that are in a position to do the crypto-economy's bidding, it'll happen, and it doesn't matter if some of them are thrown in prison or executed or die from poor government policies.

From the perspective of world history, this is a BFD. The monetary system of the past 80 years has been controlled by the ruling class of a ~150-300M person nation. The crypto economy imposes uniform rules on ~3B people, which is an order of magnitude greater complexity, and should see further specialization and gains from trade for those that participate in it.

Re: The Merge

#98

Post by thedufer »

kranke155 wrote: post #6
jameskilton wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Feel free to do a point by point rebuttal.

> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it

This only makes sense if blockchains can catch up to traditional methods, because applications in the real world will just continue to get more complex as compute power allows. A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap.

> with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components.

See above - how could running the same calculation many, many times, plus the networking costs to communicate, ever compete on price with just running it once? At least one, and more likely all, of the parties must lose in the blockchain model.

> The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world

Terrible in what way? It can't compute on price or compute power/latency/etc.

> eventually the computational differences between the two will be so low

Again - how? See above.

> that centralised databases will be less desirable just because do the warp in the social contract.

I can't come up with a way to parse this that has any meaning, so I'm not sure what to say about it.

> Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract.

This seems to be your only real argument - some vague social benefit. But how do we get there? See above - blockchains are far, far more expensive to run, so why would anyone migrate real applications to them? Even if this benefit were real, which I doubt, you don't seem to have any mechanism for making it work in the face of the very real costs of doing so.

Regulation seems like the only plausible way, but anti-regulation and anti-government is a pretty explicit goal of most blockchain folks.

Re: The Merge

#99

Post by kranke155 »

dale_glass wrote: post #87
mpeg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect, as the parent explained the point of an NFT is the signature, this proves you bought from a certain collection that was created by a certain wallet You can create your own BAYC, scammers do it all the time but they aren’t too successful because it’s trivial to see it came from an unknown wallet. Sure, you could infringe on the copyright of a non-crypto artist and pretend to be the artist in an NFT…

> This is incorrect, as the parent explained the point of an NFT is the signature, this proves you bought from a certain collection that was created by a certain wallet Note that the parent seems to be arguing something in the system removes the need to trust in the artist, that it stops the artist from creating more items than they promised. But how? Nothing stops the artist from creating a second wallet, or a secon…

It doesn’t stop the artist from re minting the same art, but if he does it will be associated to his wallet, his reputation will be tarnished, an they won’t be able to keep selling their art. The incentives are hugely against it, and unlike even physical art (who stops me from painting the same piece 20 times in secret) the ledger for the existence of the NFT is public.

Re: The Merge

#100

Post by gist »

superb-owl wrote: post #2

This disclosure should be at the top of the article: > Disclosure: My family and USV have large holdings in ETH and other crypto assets and may continue to add to them in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Why is it needed at all though? (I know it's the 'style' to disclose like this). Fred is a VC and he is blogging. It's assumed he has some interest or bias and anyone reading should be skeptical. This is not a news story. He could have a bias or an angle even if he doesn't benefit.

And what does 'large holdings' even mean anyway? Large to Fred what's large to Fred?

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