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Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

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Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#91

Post by rhodorhoades »

swivelmaster wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me why any of these values truly matter? My background is in game development both on Facebook and mobile, and I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the growth of the web and its various startups. Number of nodes and market cap both look a lot like vanity metrics to me - numbers that sound good in a market/tech-specific way but don't actually reflect the true value or growth potential…

Because crypto is banned on every meaningful platform. I can’t use my phone to mine, I can’t use defi on IOS or android. In the US I can’t access shorting on CEX, am not allowed to use tornado cash to gain privacy, I am platform locked everywhere I go and yet crypto hangs on the fringe.

Crypto is heavily censored in the US from multiple directions.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#93

Post by cowtools »

saurik wrote: post #11

I would claim that would be just as bad if not even worse, as the biggest sin in the marketing of cryptocurrencies is that people create a circular value pump that starts with VC money to subsidize "rewards" for people running nodes and then they claim "we already have hundreds of nodes!!" which causes the value of their token to go up... which then means they have more value to continue providing subsidies. These re…

I agree. It's sort of analogous to a Multi-Level-Marketing scheme wherein the most profit comes from selling the business (by offloading inventory onto the franchisees), not by selling the actual "product".

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#94

Post by latchkey »

cowtools wrote: post #89
latchkey wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a common issue. ETC was 51'd 3 times in a month not too long ago... that said, with the upcoming merge, it'll soon be the largest hash GPU/ASIC coin. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/08/29/ethereum-classic...

If I recall, the problem was that they were using the same PoW function as etherium was, so people could just use their old ETH hardware to attack ETC. Pretty sure the fix was to switch to a slightly different PoW that entails re-designing the ASICs.

Except they never switched.

For security reasons, there can only be one top coin per class of hardware.

sha256/bitcoin = asic

ethash/ethereum = gpu

randomx/xmr= cpu

Yes, there are ethash asics, but they are effectively just asic gpus with ram... the memory controller is the gating factor because ethash is memory hard [1].

The gpu balance will shift with the merge... all the hash will go to ETC and other shitcoins. $21m a day in rewards will go to $1.2m a day.

A lot of GPUs will be turning off as the profitability drops. As profit drops, large miners will sell to the retail market to cover their costs...

ETC will trend towards zero... miners will try other coins, but those will also trend to zero since they have no actual use (utility) other than speculation.

These next couple weeks are going to be fascinating to watch. This merge is not only the end of ETH mining, but it could also be the end of speculation profit for a lot of other (shit)coins.

[1] https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor...

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#95

Post by cowtools »

rhodorhoades wrote: post #91
swivelmaster wrote: post #65

Can someone explain to me why any of these values truly matter? My background is in game development both on Facebook and mobile, and I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the growth of the web and its various startups. Number of nodes and market cap both look a lot like vanity metrics to me - numbers that sound good in a market/tech-specific way but don't actually reflect the true value or growth potential…

Because crypto is banned on every meaningful platform. I can’t use my phone to mine, I can’t use defi on IOS or android. In the US I can’t access shorting on CEX, am not allowed to use tornado cash to gain privacy, I am platform locked everywhere I go and yet crypto hangs on the fringe. Crypto is heavily censored in the US from multiple directions.

I can use my phone to CPU mine with https://github.com/XMRig-for-Android/xmrig-for-android albeit at a very low hashrate. IDK about GPU mining though, seems like that could be more useful. But if you root your android device you can pretty much install anything you would on a linux system, with exceptions.

Also, I don't see why you couldn't just distribute a defi app on android as an APK, including tornado cash. I don't really know if trading on leverage is a critical part of using cryptocurrency, but I don't really see how you would be prevented from doing that on mobile unless your CEX distributes a different desktop app.

Crypto is not heavily censored in the US. I mean maybe, but it depends on what state you live in. Also, you can't legally mix coins as a service like tornado cash or coinjoin server, as that constitutes money laundering.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#96

Post by schlauerfox »

guilhas wrote: post #38
bitcurious wrote: post #3

Chia is famously decentralized when using “number of nodes” as the measure and yet is missing from this list.

Chia sounds like the biggest lost opportunity ever. Why not use the drives for cloud storage? Destroying a lot of HDDs and SSDs for nothing

it doesn't destroy disks anymore than datacenter use destroys disks.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#97

Post by schlauerfox »

1024qw wrote: post #67
mjmj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their software runs a full node and a wallet, so most users are a node by default (if I’m not mistaken) and rewards are double for the first couple years. You can run their software and just about anything, low powered CPU’s, pi’s, NAS, etc. So I don’t doubt their numbers are too far from the truth, esp considering how much China supports them. Nodes have been slowly dropping over time as the crypto boom cycle has di…

In the beginning everyone had to run a full node even if they weren’t farming (in Chia instead of mining it’s 2 stages, first plotting and then farming) but earlier this year Chia released a new light wallet which doesn’t run a full node. Now it should be mostly actual farmers that run full nodes. Chia currently has 22 EiB of netspace which would be more than 1.5 million of 14 TB hard drives.

They made a pooling protocol too to avoid the issue bitcoin had with centralization of the big pools.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#98

Post by fallat »

rocket_surgeron wrote: post #87

I think cryptocurrencies should be ranked by the mass in kilograms of the actual, real, physical products and the weight of people performing actual, real, services that have been paid for using them. Arbitrage and exchange, and all of the people and infrastructure surrounding those, would have no mass in this ranking system. "What about online stuff?" Well, yeah. If you pay for a small instance VPS using bitcoin the…

Pretty much this in a vague way. Obviously not exactly as the comment is written, but yes, it should be measured in the actual usage of the tokens.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#99

Post by cowtools »

latchkey wrote: post #94
cowtools wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall, the problem was that they were using the same PoW function as etherium was, so people could just use their old ETH hardware to attack ETC. Pretty sure the fix was to switch to a slightly different PoW that entails re-designing the ASICs.

Except they never switched. For security reasons, there can only be one top coin per class of hardware. sha256/bitcoin = asic ethash/ethereum = gpu randomx/xmr= cpu Yes, there are ethash asics, but they are effectively just asic gpus with ram... the memory controller is the gating factor because ethash is memory hard [1]. The gpu balance will shift with the merge... all the hash will go to ETC and other shitcoins. $2…

Interesting, thank you for clearing this up.

However, I think you could have multiple competing cryptocurrencies in the ASIC class, because the ASICs are not as generic as GPUs or CPUs, so they cannot be easily repurposed for attack unless they are FPGA-based (doubful).

Anyways, I'm looking forwards to the new supply of GPUs. Hopefully we don't get the same thing again with Chia hogging up all the storage on the market or Monero hogging up all the CPUs.

Re: Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

#100

Post by cowtools »

rocket_surgeron wrote: post #87

I think cryptocurrencies should be ranked by the mass in kilograms of the actual, real, physical products and the weight of people performing actual, real, services that have been paid for using them. Arbitrage and exchange, and all of the people and infrastructure surrounding those, would have no mass in this ranking system. "What about online stuff?" Well, yeah. If you pay for a small instance VPS using bitcoin the…

It's a pretty funny idea, but I have a pretty good idea of how it would end up:

"Yes, I would like to purchase a thousand stone bricks. Do you accept BrickCoin?"

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