The Problem with Ethereum(tomerstrolight.medium.com) |
The Problem with Ethereum(tomerstrolight.medium.com) |
Most of what I've heard of Vitalik paints him as having a saint-like aura (my own admittedly hyperbolic description). But then maybe we'd all appear that way if we had $billion resources at hand...
But they told me crypto would free us from centralized control! /s
Both depend on each other. Without miners, no currency, without code no mining, without very high algo difficulty, no safety.
(I was excited about Eth until I learnt its currency had persistent value...)
We're getting 0.15-1.1 ETH burned per block, while just the static reward is 2 ETH.
Imagine: a network where the only gains you get are from spending your money quickly. The anti-hodl. It would be completely worthless as a store of value or investment vehicle. Its only conceivable use would be as a fast and efficient transaction ledger.
Which is what I wanted out of blockchain to begin with! I'd be happy to support a network like that, even if my income was rapidly vanishing.
Both basic income projects. Proof of humanity ubi tokens are more easily tradeable and meant to provide Sybil resistance to eth projects, but circles has a nice self contained design which is probably more interesting as a form of basic income/ community currency.
> PostNote: This article pairs well with my piece on Bitcoiners having integrity. What it boils down to is there is no integrity in Ethereum and nothing but integrity in Bitcoin
Which seems a little...
- Different "classes" have different interests. (1)Miners. (2) Big, rich coin owners. (3) Rule makers and influencers. Group 2 & 3 overlap and might collaborate to screw miners.
- The author is thinks fundamentals/promises like "code is law" and such will gradually crack, because absolute adherence will be broken.
- Rule making is corruptible.
"sounds just like the corrupt fiat money system we’re trying to escape"
Sounds to me like you have arrived at "governance." The hope a lot of people had/have for crypto is that it replaces people, institutions and rules with explicit code. Coins would be governed by code instead of people, which works until it doesn't work.
Since this is already framed in a historical materialism sense... Imagine a society where all laws come from God, are engraved in stone and adjudicated with trials by duel, ordeal or some other way of leaving things in His mighty hands. This works until it doesn't. A currency crisis leaves 90% of people in debt slavery, and the army can't find enough recruits. A UFC champion is abusing trial by combat to get away with all crime and rob everyone. Stuff no one could have foreseen. One of the rules isn't perfect.
IRL, such societies will go one of two ways: (1) They have systemic instability, where the stone tablets can be broken and new rules adopted. Or, (2) they fudge. They have a complete and perfect constitution, and a supreme court that interprets it liberally like the US. Maybe they pretend to have a constitution even though one has never been written, like the UK. It turns out we can make that guy fight a bear instead of some poor prisoner.
There's a theoretical option 3: adhere. Play out the consequences whatever that requires. Maybe god wants everyone in debt slavery, and that ufc champion running around robbing old ladies.
Everything crypto seems to drive to the extremes. An obsession with perfect. There is no perfect.
Say smart contracts work great for collectible sneakers. Yes, it collapses when a judge rules to give a sneaker collection back to a guy that got robbed. Does that really make it worthless? Is an institution responsible for cancelling and issuing sneaker coin, on court order, really such a blasphemy?
If a new value exchange mechanism is to be invented, it really ought to be one that doesn’t slyly concentrate billions of wealth into the hands of a few. There’s plenty ways of doing that already thank you very much.
it is completely opt in, you don't have to participate.
which seems better than the money governments say we have to use (because they are in control of it and can use that power to maintain control of people).
> one that doesn’t slyly concentrate billions of wealth into the hands of a few.
lots of people in crypto very open to any ideas or suggestions you have to solving the matthew effect, non-coercive tax systems, and public goods funding. genuinely, any community currency design or trust system or consensus mechanism you can come up with people will be excited to try out. its a massive open design space right now and people want new ideas. lots of interesting discussions happening via orgs like https://www.radicalxchange.org/
But it is also needed to pay people. But people only work if they get paid. You run into the money shortage problem that caused so much trouble in 2008.
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.
If crypto ever replaces the current monetary system, late adopters will have to fight for crumbles.
And that's OK; you support deception & violence, so you stay poor. That's cosmic justice.
If you prefer to support the fiat thugs by holding into their tokens, be ready to pay the price.
Any human with a moral compass would shudder at the thought of a collapse of Western democracy, but not them: they giggle in anticipation of becoming the new ruling class or at least an exclusive society of mega-rich while those who doubted the Bitcoin religion will have to prostitute their daughters to the nouveau riche.
"Have fun staying poor" is their battle cry. In their twisted libertarian world view, people forced by hunger to toil day in, day out is not violence, but the state taxing incomes is.
Ah, baby's first step.
Recently I have been exploring Chia as a farmer. Rather than the ruling class being a group devs and random early miners, the ruling class is a (soon public) corporation. At least a corporation has a clear legal structure of existence in a capitalist society. I see it as a sort of anchor between a purely cyber community and the actual world we subject ourselves to. I can buy shares in a corporation if I want to participate in the ruling class. The ruling class has legal agency to increase the value of its share price, which is the dual of it’s the underlying asset. Farmers still make less over time but the logistics are clearly laid out in detail, and TX fees kick in to supplement. Maybe it too will all go up in flames, but until it does I’m along for the ride. I believe we can sustain a proof of work system that is orders of magnitude more efficient than constantly running sha. And personally I feel “crypto” has had enough iterations that it’s about time to pick an innovative one and throw some labor behind it.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-...
Filecoin is a more viable and useful option imho.
Please don't, it's bad enough for GPUs don't take my dinner too.
I'd rather support Bitcoin miners as they only cause an ASIC shortage, a SSD shortage is much worse for me.
Also "the ruling class" can not really force their rules on others.
Everybody participating in cryptocoins right now is hopefully aware that it is an experiment with uncertain outcomes. So the "promises were broken" thing doesn't really convince me, either. I don't think the users of Ethereum were promised a finished product.
"Code is law" also only applies if people accept the law. In the DAO case, people decided to change the law, or stick to Ethereum classic.
There is no problem with Ethereum.
I can't entirely opt out of crypto because people around me are making or losing (mostly losing) money it.
Mining also pollutes air that I breathe and accelerates climate change.
Regardless of whether you think these external effects are worthwhile, they exist and are unavoidable.
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.
I’m sorry that this is the case; I really wish that the system we live in was sustainable, but it’s not, and it probably won’t be reformed before it’s too late. Maybe this is a matter of opinion, but it happens to be the most common opinion of people that have studied the matter without incentive to believe one narrative. I have never seen a well-informed defense by an independent writer that did not rely almost exclusively on appeal to authority.
There are opportunists. There are scammers. That’s not how this thing got started. We started this to mitigate an unstoppable problem. I personally never liked many economic aspects of the Bitcoin protocol, and dismissed it very early. I know many others that aped into mining a fortune based on much less understanding. I’m now willing to accept that it is the least bad of likely candidate solutions, and the reason for that is that all newer entrants cannot gain relevance without massive investment, which means owners from the old failing system.
If the US dollar collapses or experiences hyperinflation, and/or US banks all collapse, pretty much everything is going to be fucked everywhere, most likely. Especially because whatever's driving that catastrophe is probably disrupting lots of other things, as well. (A major war, for example. The global Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc. networks might become disconnected and fragmented in those scenarios. Let alone infrastructure for fiat exchanges or paying for things with cryptocurrency.)
I think these events are very unlikely to begin with, yet a lot of cryptocurrency maximalists speak as though they're likely or inevitable in the mid-term or near-term. But if they do actually happen, I think digital currencies are going to be the least of almost everyone's concerns at those times.
https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...
https://hugonguyen.medium.com/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engin...
https://hugonguyen.medium.com/work-is-timeless-stake-is-not-...
https://medium.com/hackernoon/sharding-centralizes-ethereum-...
https://blog.lamden.io/turing-incompleteness-and-the-sad-sta...
My experience in crypto over the past two years has been exactly the opposite. The main issues facing the space today all have to do with governance: how do you get holders of gov tokens to vote rather than hold? how do you involve them in the evolution of your protocol? There are entire protocols being designed to allow "vote selling" to incentivize delegation for small owners.
Code is a tool to make sure laws are enforced. But the rules are increasingly being made and amended at the social/political layer.
It may not be democratic. it may not be fair. it may not be efficient. but it's a damn interesting experiment to watch evolve.
That's why I wrote had/have. Highly idealistic ideas for crypto have been a huge part of this whole thing. Predictably though, reality is bringing the ideas down to earth... and what you describe is what that means.
"Code is a tool to make sure laws are enforced", is far less idealistic than "code is law." More corruptible. More practicable. These can all be true at one.
I agree that its fascinating.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/oyhzop/ethereum_b...
and I think tools that help people coordinate/unionise/collectivise around shared interests is good for all of us who are working people.
we dont have to be totally cynical and an accelerationist to believe there are flaws with government and money. I dont think the western democracies are collapsing, i feel like i have decent representation where i live. But i think things could be done better, ive also witnessed massive wastes of resources in local government, corruption and collusion. I dont think the systems we've inherited from pre-electricity society are going to be the absolute best we can ever come up with. this is hackernews, where people praise saas startups and hobbies and research on new gpus. but damn you if you think we can come up with better money or government.
I think people are just skeptical of the intentions of those of us working in the space (which is sensible) because of the money and the memes and the absurdity of the energy around the crypto space. but i dont understand why people are so doom and gloom about it, 99.9% of the people involved arent living in a bunker waiting for the collapse of society, generally the eth devs ive met are very positive and optimistic and like you say, believe we deserve better.
But something has to come out of it all, and crypto seems like the most resilient possibility.
The actual real exciting stuff regarding the cryptos is here: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
Why do you consider this a structural problem?
If you fill disks full of junk, you're increasing the write wear on those disks. Despite the rumors, GPUs don't just wear out.
In fact, crypto is perceived it seems to be an absolute value stashing system where you collect your reward and store it for free until you want others to produce effort for you.
But I refuse to produce effort for a guy who spent his energy 50 years ago and just throw at me a few gold coins to do his bidding. He wants me to work, he needs to pretend to be doing something too.
Yes but apparently you need crypto to have censorship-proof cheap transactions that finish quickly.
In theory, you can do that on a fiat currency. In practice, my transactions take days.
It died because you cannot start with the currency. It has to be a local community project. There are lots of complementary currencies on this planet but only regional currencies end up successful.
Cryptocurrencies are problematic because they don't foster a face to face community. The idea is that you are taking advantage of a sucker 1000miles away from you.
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
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)
A hard fork is allowed to violate existing rules, and gives you more flexibility in what can be changed. And miners do not have the power to decide whether or not a hard fork will happen. A hard fork is determined by the users, who have to upgrade their software.
If the software updates automatically, then the power of hard forking lies with the developers, who could just push the new code out via an automatic update.
Agreed.
Marx's working class consists of those who do not own means of production, and are therefore compelled to sell their labour.
Miners do not lack means of production; they operate expensive mining machinery. That machinery continues to run, and earn money for the miner, even while the miner sits on the beach. Selling their labour really isn't a good model for what's going on. Miners are just ordinary capitalists, exploiting a market opportunity.
workers cycle: Commodity(labor) -> Money -> Commodity(food, housing bills)
Capitalists cycle: Money -> Commodity(means of production) -> Money(profit/surplus value)
At least that is the bit that kind of sticked to me and made me realized in the west you want to do the second cycle. Earn money by selling labor, live life as a cheap ass for a while use savings to become a asshole landlord.
One response is that the promise was not well thought through. The idea was to replace "rulers" (human beings who make decisions to take care of a system) and "law" (written rules interpreted by humans) with code. But (a) code is written by humans who make mistakes; (b) the world changes, and systems need to update to respond to that; (c) somebody has to be responsible for dealing with a and b. As a result, currencies need central organizers to look after them. And those central organizers need to be motivated, i.e., paid. Old-fashioned currencies have sovereigns to back them, and the sovereigns are paid by the monopoly of taxation and/or the ability to issue money. Inefficient, but it works.
From this perspective, bitcoin et al. look like technical solutions to social problems. In particular, bitcoin is designed to have nobody taking care of public goods problems on its behalf. That's a flaw![1]
[1] https://wyclif.substack.com/p/thought-bubble-defending-bitco...
It seems to me that this is actually the correct thing to do. I'd rather the core devs take their time and iron out the issues instead of being incentivized to play fast and loose with a system that manages billions.
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 ebay.
> As a Bitcoiner I find these actions intolerable and unacceptable
Bitcoin has also forked, many times. Bitcoin Gold for example restored the ability to mine with GPUs. The "ruling class" decided that unless you had access to custom hardware, you could not be part of the "working class".
People can and still do mine Ethereum with the cards they did 5 years ago, and the difficulty is irrelevant to whether your hardware is outdated or not.
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.
Regarding the content, the class allegory itself can go the other way as well: the core developers can be thought of as the workers, the miners are the owners of means of production etc.
The one point that’s relevant is the rule-making: the DAO hack hard fork has proven that Ethereum’s boasts of decentralization are dubious at best.
Etherium, and most crypto-currencies for that matter, were initially made to fix a broken financial system, where banks unjustly control too much wealth, and changes the rules so that they will always control too much wealth.
Etherium does not fix this, it merely copies this system, with all its flaws(and some new ones). That is why etherium is pointless. It does not provide value to society, as it utterly fails to solve the problem it identified.
There is no other crypto-currency that does solve this problem, but then I guess some of them never tried to in the first place.
Collectively, paying miners is like paying the mob to not destroy the system, as they are only group with the power to do so. Without miners at all attacks would be impossible. 51% attacks on ETC show that the threat is real.
The working class are users - people using and building on ethereum. Their wealth is continuously drained by the mob, but there is hope - a wall staffed by militia is being slowly erected. It's called proof of stake, and once finished, the mob can finally be told to fuck off. In the meantime the absolute value of protection money paid to the mob has grown several times, making it possible to reduce the protection payments percentage rate without impacting security of the people.
There are networks running right now that use the energy of a windmill to provide secure transactions, and more of them, processed in under a second, with no fee at all.
That's not vaporware; that's current reality. All Bitcoin miners are doing is perpetuating a system that has been very groundbreaking but is now obsolete in every way.
The market most efficiently determines whether [& which] to sacrifice (e.g. computation or capital lock-up) is worthwhile.
There s no solution, it s the basic of energy limitation: you have an enormous incentive to conserve energy until we can get so much more than we require with so little spending that it becomes irrelevant. But then, we ll find ways, probably, to spend so much energy that we ll reach the limit again.
A bit like in the 2000s when you kept doubling your disk drive space every year and still kept filling it at exponential rate :D
Ether's price has risen exponentially. It doesn't make sense (and isn't necessary) to pay miners exponentially higher amounts of money to do the same job, thus the issuance reductions.
[edit] ah, of course. a bitcoin maximalist. how dare there be an alternative use-case for crypto that involves people using it. the thing bitcoin has going for it is a large community of peripheral people believing it will be the global reserve currency (it wont).
At this point, the only thing that can stop the flippening after the merge is a government ban that specifically impacts ethereum (like they tried with the PoW-only exemption amendment).
This sums up the whole piece in my view. Bitcoin development stagnated years ago exactly because nobody involved wanted to change/hard fork it to implement improvements.
For people who want a Bitcoin-like Ethereum with no DAO fork or staking there's Ethereum Classic.
I wouldn’t consider that stagnate.
Bitcoin has been incapable of doing a hardfork for whatever reason for a while.
That's why it will disappear sooner or later. If you don't evolve, you die.
The way that article portrays it ties more into an allegory. Let's not forget that every participant is there voluntarily, and if they are genuinely suffering, they will choose to move on. Ethereum is a powerful connecting force that brings trust within the internet.
I've got a bridge to sell you when you're ready
In case anyone is not familiar with the phrase : "I've got a bridge to sell you when you're ready"
(1) A con artist who sold a bridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Parker
Not to be confused with :- (2) Rumoured that the wrong 'London' bridge was sold to Arizona (vs Tower Bridge) https://www.history.com/news/how-london-bridge-ended-up-in-a...
It could be argued that both apply - but I'm not getting into that argument !
it shows us that community and support for one another is the Layer 0 that these things are built on top of. code isnt law, people come first. if we stick with that it could work pretty well.
E.g., I've been wondering why a certain Bitcoin podcaster, who is very popular, has never mined a Bitcoin. He/she talks all day about "stacking Sats", but he/she only buys them. Reading this article made me realize that he/she might see him/herself as a member of the ruling class.
Not to mention the ASICs, by the time end-users can acquire them they're usually outdated.
The people actually mining Bitcoin don't have time for podcasts.
Podcasts, Youtube, media in general are mostly dominated by people who don't actually do other work, because creating content for those platforms is extremely time-consuming.
National governments the world over will gladly ban crypto before raising income taxes. They have backed themselves into this corner with the central banks and they won’t be able to resist its ease.
Was it? Most of these goals were definitely not talked about when Bitcoin was first invented, and to this day I wouldn't say this is the list the vast majority of people in the crypto space would come up with if you asked them what the point of cryptocurrency is.
And somehow Ethereum is one of the most positively viewed cryptocurrencies out there. I don't get it.
[1] This is only a mild exaggeration.
All the validator deposits are public data; how would they be destroyed? The funds will have to be unlocked at some point, people will demand it.
That's a recipe for a high priest class.
Still, the hoards eat it up. It's a testament to the power of complex, flawed ideas, marketed to the hilt, and the promise of riches if you stick with the leadership.
It's really a recipe for a technology religion.
I still have a lot of questions about ethereum as a project (like: what are blockchains actually good for?), but this software project management stuff is way down the list of concerns for me. I certainly don't understand why people care about arbitrary deadlines and timelines. One advantage of open and permissionlessly developed software like this is not being beholden to a boss breathing down your neck about deadlines and timelines. Just build the software, it will be done when it's done.
Fair point to the author for finding the dynamic nature of Ethereum's progression not to their liking, but it's a real reach to portray it as some kind of class conflict parable.
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 still be valuable in 10 years. They could be replaced entirely by new chains with different software.
If we waited for everything to be mature, then we wouldn't have used web browsers in the early days. I remember when people were afraid to put a credit card into a website.
Bitcoin and ETH won't get replaced for the same reasons we ended up with Hacker News, Facebook, Google, Apple, Ebay, Amazon... network effects are amazingly strong.
Bitcoiners use the phrase: "The next bitcoin is bitcoin."
But honestly:
No playing field has been as level/fair as that of crypto.
The nature of crypto means 'The house' is more transparently verifiable & cost-efficient than.. anything else.
Be it tokens, prediction markets, nft markets etc.
It seems to be the one place where disconnected individuals anywhere on earth with little but an internet connection can get a decent seat at the economic table.
This is patently untrue. These questions literally split the community. The majority chose a direction and moved on.
I also think it’s asking the wrong questions in a way. Whether Bill Gates should have made billions or not whether he should be in charge and corporate structure is largely irrelevant to Silicon Valley crushing it.
Fairness equitability and consistency would be nice but is not compulsory at all
I really wonder what Ethereum investors think of this. A "precedent" was made. Crypto has yet to come to the real test with governments, courts and the physical laws of humans. With Bitcoin, it can be stipulated that changing the network is impossible or unheard of; but that's not the case for Ethereum.
It doesn't help, also, that the network is being "processed" by a few elites (or pools of wealth) that could be, potentially, identified and made to obey the "government/s".
This is not the case of Bitcoin where the introduction of KYC for mining will require a hard-fork. Bitcoin (the core chain) has never undertook a hard-fork (which is why a lot of Bitcoin forks are out there).
It's possible to experiment and build decentralized governance models directly into blockchains see e.g. https://polkadot.network/polkadot-governance/ (disclaimer not a shill I like the tech)
But a Pareto distribution is kind of the default wherever people interact. So a system needs to be deliberately constructed to counteract it, if that's its goal. And saying "praise the market" won't be enough.
(c) I actually disagree with. Decentralized governance is a very interesting subject, and some cryptos like Tezos are governed quite decentralized in many ways.
Right now I'm really confident in how Ethereum is governed, with the "old-fashioned" open-source development model, where everyone can participate, but core devs have the final say. However, decentralized governance may be something they implement in the future.
[*] Slightly harsh, see comments below.
Whenever crypto enthusiasts tell me about DeFi governance, I get excited about the possibilities.
Then, I actually take a look at some of the group decisions, and literally all of them are crypto/coin-related, and don’t deal with any /real/ or human problems…
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 think risk-aversiveness is a good thing. While I was initially a big blocker, now I think that going without a hard fork was probably quite a good idea. Bitcoin still works nicely and I still use it a lot, now I just use LN transactions in addition to onchain txes.
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".
"Commonly cited estimates range from 39% to 73% renewable energy. Jesse Morris, CEO of non-profit Energy Web says most estimates find 20% to 50% of bitcoin is powered by renewable energy, but all available numbers are based on self-reported data, which is unverifiable. 30 June 2021"
My inner optimist is satisfied that the renewable percentage is constantly growing.
My understanding of the changing of the rules "as you go" is that it's based on the reality being faced by the system. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is simultaneously one of it's strengths and one of its weaknesses, and Ethereum has chosen to move from PoW to PoS because of the belief that it's the right path to follow in attempting to solve the problems the system is facing in reality.
I don't think the "working class" vs. "ruling class" analogy is particularly fitting. However, to continue the analogy, the profitability of Ethereum mining (from what I've heard) would have allowed pretty much all of the early "working class" to have climbed the social ladder to "ruling class" if they held onto some percentage of their earnings (you know, like "savings" or "investments" in this real-world analogy). If the "working class" believed in the longevity of the project they've chosen to work for, wouldn't they see the investment opportunity? Otherwise they're just there for the immediate profit, and there's no long-term contract or agreement that's been broken. The system is evolving, like what happens in the real world.
> As a Bitcoiner... > We wouldn’t dare... > We would never... > doesn’t have a ruling class to take advantage of other classes
Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Take off the rose-coloured glasses, "your community" isn't sunshine and roses either.
Personally, I think PoW may be what brings Bitcoin down in the long-term.
I think this is unfair. These are splinter communities. It's like critiquing Ethereum's community by pointing at Ethereum Classic and Binance Smart Chain.
>Personally, I think PoW may be what brings Bitcoin down in the long-term.
I pretty much agree with this part. I think it'll probably cause very serious issues for it over the next decade. I predict they'll actually eventually move off of PoW or drastically alter the PoW algorithm, but only after many years of infighting and stubborn refusal to consider the possibility.
This road map comes to mind: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/133392262085774540...
It's very outdated now, that's not the point. The point is that every circle on the road map is a very complicated project in and of itself that needs tons of research, development and testing to be implemented properly. Just the code itself is thousands of commits.
Argument 1: Proof of stake concentrates wealth more than proof of work.
You can make that argument, but POS advocates have for a long time argued that proof of work mining has more economies of scale than proof of stake and therefore the opposite is actually true. Equating proof of work miners to the working class & stakers or developers as wealthy elites or rulers is so massively cringe it's tough to even read.
Argument 2: Ethereum is in active development, is planning to switch to proof of stake, has things like difficulty bombs, and therefore is somehow dishonest.
Decentralized blockchain communities come to consensus around different values and philosophies. Eth has for a long time been a community which values consistent iteration and improvement around fundamental aspects of the protocol. The transition to proof of stake has been known for years and years. There's nothing dishonest about any of this. If anything the community has been asking for faster iteration to solve high transaction fees and improve usability. Bitcoin's development stagnation works fine for bitcoin. Ethereum is clearly making the right move in continuing to improve the base protocol. Which as you mention is a huge, extremely complicated undertaking.
The article goes on to some cognitive dissonance about how Ethereum doesn't deliver on promises despite the fact that it just delivered a major protocol update last week... might as well throw in the dao hack and icos and whatever else in there and see if anything sticks. I guess with nothing to develop or build, bitcoin maxi's have a lot of time to ramble incoherently about Ethereum. And they probably always will.
If you will hard fork every time it's convenient, you don't have anything stable.
If they did it once, that would be one thing. But now it's happening semi regularly.
Difficulty bomb is pretty much a marketing lie by now.
Creating a hard fork isnt easy as you make it out to be
> This time the working class has their pay reduced from 4 Eth to 3 Eth per block, a 25% pay cut. Miners now earn 40% less per block than at the time of the community’s constitution, which promised that code was law, and which the ruling class later said they would break only once, for what was an especially good reason. But the code is law promise has now been broken so many times people expect it to occur at regular intervals and even worry that “progress” is slowing down if there aren’t frequent enough hard forks (to break that promise yet again).
With PoS, the pay for miners is planned to be cut from 3 eth all the way down to 0, and that's great that Ethereum will become more efficient in that it no longer needs so much compute time spent on it. Ethereum will switch to needing stakers to provide a service to it that they're paid for, but if people designing Ethereum knew a way to not require that while still staying decentralized, then that would also be a great upgrade.
The "code is law" is not some universal absolute. Blockchains have always been forkable. But a chain can't have a contentious fork without a cost and it becomes costlier and riskier to do later in a chain's life.
Miners don't earn 40% less, they earn 180000% more than back then. Of course not individual miners, but as a "working class".
Miners are free not to upgrade every time a new protocol version is proposed. Why do they upgrade then? If consensus was established around the older set of rules, that would be it. But instead there's consensus around the newer rules. And that's simply because miners individually decide that the newer rules are better, for whatever reason.
It forces node operators to come to consensus on whether to fork alongside the developers or to fork in a different direction. It removes the option of doing nothing and letting the Ethereum chain stagnate.
One key one is price, another is that most miners barely understand how the network works and therefore couldn't exert any force even if they wanted to.
Pools concentrate the force, but miners can move to whatever pool they like the best (usually the most profitable... which is where the main store of wealth is)...
disclosure: large scale eth miner
I don't think that's quite what you mean to say. The function of banks is to manage wealth. That's their one job. It's like blaming them for being too much of what they are.
Bitcoin has not eliminated banks, it's just created new ones called bitcoin exchanges, online wallets, etc. The only reason they don't function even more like banks (paying interest on deposits, making loans, etc) is because coins are predominantly used more like assets than like currency so there's not much of a market for financial-like services.
No?
Buterin argued to the bitcoin core developers that Bitcoin and blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money and needed a more robust language for application development that could lead to attaching real-world assets, such as stocks and property, to the blockchain.[15]
It's like you're trying to describe Ethereum from what bitcoin fanboys have told you.
The whole idea of "code is law" is deeply flawed, and I think the hard forks prove that. The problem then is that smaller financial injustices that do not get the attention of the core Devs, will go unchecked and unfixed forever.
The idea of zero trust financial applications is intriguing, but in practice "zero trust" means "trust Vitalik", and to be honest, I trust my current bank more than I trust some random dude in the internet, thank you very much. (Not that I'm a fan of my current bank, they suck, just slightly less than any alternative I'm aware of)
I know some people develop other kinds of applications too, but I completely fail to see the point of running (for example) a video game on the Blockchain other than the novelty..
At the end of the day, Ethereum is still community driven. In my opinion the main benefit of Ethereum and other blockchain technologies is transparency. Everyone can choose to go over the books and anyone can check discrepancies in the blockchain if some parties try to cheat. The beauty of this is that because there’s no formalized government, value can be generated by global consensus and currencies can be picked up and dropped based on whether the contributors are faithfully serving the community.
Perhaps the best thing a cryptocurrency can do is be neutral, and let society sort its own equality out. Like gold-backed currency, only global and instant.
No smart contracts, no de-fi, no staking, no miners, no new coins or coins burned on a timer. Just extremely divisible coins that can be sent completely without fees.
And there is a coin like this; Nano. Their community has the full expectation of being always fee-less. It even solved the spamming problem, at least to a point of 'good enough', without adding fees.
I'm not sure there's much reason, to my mind, to try and add more stuff on top of that. Expecting a crypto currency to be both widely adopted and solve inequality is - possibly - just too tall an order.
What happened to accepting things as they are simply because it's obvious the market can bear it?
The ideology and sales pitches of that ideology are not really relevant. These are platforms. No different than Shopify being a platform. You build on them, extract value, walk away. Who cares if Shopify - for example - said "our platform is decentralized and fixes clean water in Africa" and it didn't. Who cares? Does it still allow you to extract value? Yes? That's the whole equation. Figure it out at Harvard Business School a decade from now, or figure it out now.
Oh, and BTW, it's called "Ethereum". Not "Etherium".
There is ether (the asset) and etheriumn (the chain), while usage of the latter accrues value to the former, the latter is what's important (and not the former). All that matters for these platforms is usage. There are other good level 1's with traction from users/developers (terra/solana specifically).
The idea that there's going to be only 1 blockchain for value transmission or that users really care about highly technical points about decentralization are laughable. People care about the apps, use-cases, and [jpegs of rocks](https://opensea.io/).
This ain't binary. Ain't yes or no.
Also.. why do you assume crypto is gunning for 'global reserve currency'?
Crypto enables all types of experiments toward reducing the insider-asymmetry nature of central control control (e.g. political whim money printing, political whim monetary policy)
>Fiat will always be better for the stability of finance and governance bc they perceive or have a tiny lever of control
Political, centrally controlled money shifts economic risk from away from markets/market participants (the most efficient distributed value-computation we have) onto politically-determined populations.
example: fiat policy shifted 2008 wall street bankruptcy risk away from markets onto ordinary people who're being inflated-away & exploited by the Cantillion Effect.
Certainly our politics leads to the socialization of corporate risk, but crypto is subject to the same politics only with a much smaller pool of voters. Spending on any community at this global scale will be looked at as pork and the needs of disenfranchised will calcify further. Again, it’s code and it’s not immutable. The mechanisms of distributing crypto clients will betray the interests of the common citizen. There is no leverage for commoners, only special interests.
Inflation could be used to redistribute wealth for greater equity and the worlds wealthiest see this threat which I think is the only reason crypto has their attention.
Do you have any evidence at all about this or are you just parroting Austrian mantras?
* Ok not nobody. But this is not the focus of the project at all.
That's not true, introducing full kyc for transactions only requires 51% of hashrate.
>It doesn't help, also, that the network is being "processed" by a few elites (or pools of wealth) that could be, potentially, identified and made to obey the "government/s".
A direct opposite is true. PoW is extremely vulnerable to a government takeover. Even in the worst case, buying majority of hashpower requires few billions at most - which is well within the ability of many countries.
More practically, overwhelming majority of mining is done by registered companies in impossible to hide industrial warehouses, making them trivial to regulate and force to do kyc. Total fees are very low on bitcoin now, meaning it's more profitable to mine even empty blocks (due to kyc requirement) in a place with cheap electricity than try to mine with transactions in a place with more expensive electricity. Additionally, America is notorious for trying to enforce its jurisdiction globally, so eg. European miners processing kycless American transaction may find themselves in an American prison. Even if their countries won't extradite them, all it takes is a vacation in a wrong country. Chinese ban on mining has ironically made miners-enforced kyc a much more likely prospect. Other countries are much more likely to cooperate with America and jointly force miners to enforce kyc.
Contrary to PoW, PoS can function purely anonymously - invisible home nodes instead of big industrial warehouses. External attack by buying enough stake is impossible - there's simply not enough for sale over any realistic periods of time. Regulation is infeasible because legal escape is in theory possible even if only one tiny place in the world remains without forced kyc - there's no need for GWs of power, just some power and internet. Even in countries where it's illegal, hiding a home node is realistic - using tor, vpns and similar, making enforcement very hard.
Hopefully kyc laws on block generation aren't actually enforced as that would significantly impact adoption, however, if they were actually to happen, you are going to see bitcoin miners enforcing kyc while eth2 PoS continues unchanged.
https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-gtx...
Software development is a pretty free market as far as labor markets go. If a developer doesn't like the terms of the contract they're offered, they can bail and work somewhere else.
With Ethereum, their "Minimum Necessary Issuance" social contract has been very clear in the docs since the beginning of the project.
For example, a region might have 50% of its power from hydro and 50% from gas, but 0% of new power plants are hydro and 100% are gas. In such a world, adding a new electricity consumer to the grid causes 100% gas emissions, even though "50% of power is clean hydro." The proper attribution really ought to be the causal attribution, which typically means looking at the marginal source of power rather than the average.
I know this is a complicated topic. Entire PhD theses have been written on modeling the emissions impact of EVs, and there's a healthy debate of how to best calculate the 'causal' impact.
all bitcoin mines are is a proof of investment for the purposes of divvying up entries in a decentralized periodic lottery where the probability of winning is proportional to ones investment in equipment and energy.
is it really truly impossible to efficiently simulate this (specifically the economics, so that existing players don't revolt) while maintaining decentralization in the consensus algorithm?
it seems like there could be a technical solution, but the harder problem is building political consensus in a decentralized world... sort of like getting the global economy off of fossil fuels...
People have lots of theories of what other kinds of applications benefit from running on a blockchain. These are at various stages of being proven out. One that seems promising is attributing ownership to digital assets. But there are other theories too. This is all very new and speculative and it might all go nowhere, but it definitely isn't accurate that only financial applications would theoretically benefit.
In fact when LukeJr made a threat of a PoW fork during the segwit activation drama, Chinese miners said they secured enough gpus to kill the fork when it starts.
This seems contrary to everything crypto claims to be about. "Just trust them, surely you'll get the money back"
That's exactly what the article did.
Ethereum is the cryptocurrency I personally like the most, but I do find supporters tend to downplay just how controversial that incident was.
Using the original article author's analogy, the "working class" are adding their own percentage to the retail price and taking those profits home.
They typically don't have the on-chain analysis or skill to reorder the transactions in the highest extractable way, so people bid for these opportunities through side channels they signal the miner to do (off-chain) based on the mempool (backlog) of transactions. Miners profit from this activity and in some cases these profits exceed the 2ETH per block issuance. The class analogy is strained and doesn't fit at all. These are only possible because Ethereum has a rich application layer (and if anyone is 'working class' it's the users, devs and dapps on the chain). But these profits more than made up for any offset in EIP1559 losses.
I am very optimistic about Ethereum. It is not perfect but it is massively and consistently improving. The past few years, all crypto innovation was incubated within the Ethereum community.
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Now that that is out of the way, I don't necessarily believe that Argument 1 is inherently true (I know you aren't necessarily supporting it but I figured I'd throw my 2p in).
Ultimately Proof of Stake is just moving from a system with an external resource to one with an internal resource. This theoretically allows you to largely divorce the system from the harsh realities of the outside world (whose rules those external resources are bound to). By isolating the system you can better structure the rules of the game (from a game theory perspective) without being influenced or bound to rules from the outside system. Of course this isolation is only as strong as the network (larger market cap makes attacks harder) but generally once the network reaches scale it is largely independent of the outside world.
How a system influences the distribution of wealth ultimately depends on those rules in the system and by PoS largely granting the system the ability to decide those rules for itself, you can theoretically design a system with an expected steady state at or around the middle class at which the system can help lift those with less wealth up and weigh those with more wealth down. Balance it incorrectly and you run into issues one way (concentration of wealth) or another (lack of staking support opening up risks for attack) but theoretically it can be done right.
One of the key features of that balance is that wealth is worth the same whether it is held by many people or one person. It should be just as viable for a thousand people to lend 100 dollars as it is for a firm or wealthy individual to lend 100k with both groups exposed to the same amount of risk all other things the same.
Various mechanisms of the network including staking (including delegation), access to a democratically controlled treasury, first class support for governance primitives, and other such features are essential for making such a system work. Proof of Stake on its own may generally provide an accrual of wealth but in combination with the other forces on the network it should be perfectly viable to create a network that promotes distribution towards a reasonable steady state (with deviations due to merit of the individuals or just outright luck and not maintaining such deviations long term).
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/rant
I'm generally pretty cynical but no matter how hard I dig into it, I can't find a reason why PoS shouldn't be one of the last pieces of the puzzle to produce such a system and if it's even just a chance I think it's exceptionally valuable that we pursue it. Or maybe I'm just a crazy Crypto-LibSoc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You should take a look at RocketPool. It is a project that will introduce decentralized staking pools allowing people with >0.01 ETH to trustlessly stake (except for smart contract risk, of course).
Lido for example, a staking provider, already keeps their new deposits in custody of a contract like this.
Staking services like RocketPool just bring the idea to ETH but if you were early, you can stake on your own.
Anyone can change the crypto you use if you don't like the mechanisms or decisions.
Most can't change their choice of government/monetary policy.
Market selection pressure works very well historically. We don't have this without crypto.
>The mechanisms of distributing crypto clients will betray the interests of the common citizen. There is no leverage for commoners, only special interests.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Unclear.
>Inflation could be used to redistribute wealth for greater equity and the worlds wealthiest see this threat which I think is the only reason crypto has their attention.
Are you aware of the nature of inflation? Of where new money supply 1st hits? of the set of special interests aware of & open-market-front-running impending inflation before it's unanimously decided on? Doesn't seem like it.
> Anyone can change the crypto you use if you don't like the mechanisms or decisions.
> Market selection pressure works very well historically. We don't have this without crypto.
Even with Crypto you don't have this. Crypto is not legal tender, no one has to accept your dogecoin for debts and the only way you can use it is by traversing exchanges with sufficient volume. Network effect is the strongest power here and corporations will coalesce around a handful of coins and all other coins that don't benefit their political interests will be subject to exchange fees which is a non-trivial headwind. Your proclamation about market selection pressure works great in a vacuum, but ignores the reality of our laws and how cartels work.
> I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Unclear.
51% attack without any overt subterfuge. A slow boil of legally bribing and buying the means to define the policy of and to distribute client code which benefits the cartel of exchanges, brokers and miners over the retail user. Once the cartel has sufficient dominance, they can tighten the screws and extract wealth from the retail user.
>Are you aware of the nature of inflation? Of where new money supply 1st hits? of the set of special interests aware of & open-market-front-running impending inflation before it's unanimously decided on? Doesn't seem like it.
Yes. Yes. Can you ask that again in words I might understand?
Being an asshole is not a requirement for landlords, nor is it exclusive to them. Oppressed workers can be assholes too!
Can you elaborate on this - why would the core project care how many times it's forked? The forks shouldn't affect the core project at all, that's the whole point of having a fork in the first place. Or alternatively, if you like and use the fork, then you aren't on the core bitcoin chain anymore. Either way the main BTC chain doesn't care.
Some changes (eg. to the block reward schedule) are only possible on a hard fork as it makes the main chain incompatible with the pre-fork chain.
That's the philosophical difference between the projects: ETH is not afraid of hard forks and to this date, they have been uncontested. BTC never considers a hard fork and has had at least two major contested ones.
_Objectively_ better alternatives to Bitcoin are around for at least the last five years.
No one can realistically argue that it's better to have a system use 6 million times more energy, cost infinitely more, and require waiting 16 minutes for a confirmation compared to less than a second.
"The market" is chock-full of inertia, vested interests, propaganda, sunk costs, and technical ignorance. There are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies - and the majority are scams. What has "the market" done to protect people?
I say all this to do my part to improve "the market", but my estimation of the market's ability to efficiently determine its arse from a hole in the ground is low.
Other examples of "the market's efficiency" include tobacco companies responsible for killing millions making bank for decades by fudding science, energy companies fudding data for decades to burn the planet while making billions, monopolies, duopolies, externalised costs, racketeering, collusion, collateral damage, etc etc etc.
If you truly think this way, you're deluding yourself & this is where I stop reading.
Everything has tradeoffs. There's no 'objective' better.
Yes there is.
Every chess move has advantages and disadvantages, yes. But some are objectively better.
Every algorithm has advantages and disadvantages. But some are objectively better.
Believing that nothing can be objectively better than Bitcoin, and calling people who disagree delusional, is less than useful.
Maybe look up 'efficiency'. If we can achieve the same outcome at different costs, then the method that achieves said outcome incurring the least cost is objectively better than the others.
It makes Bitcoin look like an anti-technology.
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.
Half of this article is complaints about how Ethereum is moving too slowly with the PoS transition. They're certainly not of the "move fast and break things" mindset.
You can't. Be serious.
What percentage of internet transactions are performed in Bitcoin? 1%? 0.1%?
it is really sad state of affairs when you only consider something as not stagnant when it's constantly putting people's money at tremendous risk.
at least the market seems to understand it.
As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics.
The miners who I watched were just kind of bandwagon on the theme of "wait, I'll earn less cause you're burning my fees"?
Which in reality isn't entirely the case (price and usage have gone up, along with the lack of wallet support).
https://cryptobriefing.com/ethereum-miners-protesting-eip-15...
>As a very large miner, I was always for 1559 because I understand the underlying mechanics.
I don't know what mechanics you think others didn't understand. Your profitability has dropped and the move is basically moving miners' profit to the largest holders (e.g. everyone who pushed for the change). It's not like the fees have dropped since EIP-1559 if that's something you thought the change will bring for some reason.
The mechanics I'm referring to are in the 50+ page document that I read, that I'm sure most people (miners) are not even aware of: https://hackmd.io/@timbeiko/1559-updates/https%3A%2F%2Fhackm...
As for profitability changes, that's almost impossible to measure right now. There is too many variables. One is that there isn't any wallet support for 1559 yet (MM came out today and is apparently, um, lacking). People are still over paying for transactions. Difficulty + price changes + pool luck + changes in hardware stability also make things nearly impossible to track accurately. I have a margin of error, but it doesn't look too bad right now actually.
I think it's fair that if you've purchased specialized mining equipment, you expect the ROI you were promised. Doesn't seem strange.
> Ethereum functions on proof-of-work and needs some people to sell their compute time and electricity
So compensation for work. If not 'workers', you could call them 'investors', or perhaps 'sole traders', or 'merchants', not sure what the best analogy would be. To be fair, I don't necessarily put them in the same class as people making socks in a sweat shop on slave wage. The down-trodden Ethereum miner is not someone I lose sleep about.
ROI was never promised. Ethereum has always had a "Minimum Necessary Issuance" policy. Keeping issuance constant would be deviation from the policy, reducing it when possible is in line with the policy. From the docs:
> Ethereum's Monetary Policy is defined by the rewards that are paid out by the protocol at any given time. Ethereum's current yearly network issuance is approximately 4.5% with 2 Ether per block and an additional 1.75 Ether per uncle block (plus fees) being rewarded to miners.
> Ethereum does not have a fixed supply because a fixed supply would also require a fixed security budget for the Ethereum network. Rather than arbitrarily fix Ethereum's security, Ethereum's monetary policy is best described as "minimum issuance to secure the network".
> Ethereum has had a history of reducing issuance to these estimated minimums and the network has never increased issuance. The move to proof-of-stake is also part of Ethereum's effort to reduce issuance to minimum amounts without sacrificing security.
* It uses GPUs.
* ROI in terms of ethereum is basically irrelevant. Real ROI depends on the bouncy crazy chart.
* Was there not enough warning before the changes?
Many miners buy purpose built servers for crypto mining.
> Was there not enough warning before the changes?
That's the main plaint of the article, and reiterated multiple times. The article claims that the prices was dropped with 2 of the forks, each time it was promised (including at the very beginning) that changes would never be made. Each fork seemed to be of gain to the people who were part of the ICO, but at an income loss to miners. There were several broken promises of no further forks.
What we should think of as constituting sound money has not changed since 2008.
That is what bitcoin is supposed to be - sound money.
Ethereum is supposed to be something else - and it makes sense for Ethereum to "innovate" much more than bitcoin does.
Bitcoin can't be used as money in most cases as transactions are too expensive and slow. It has failed its primary function. Instead of doing something about it, the notion of using bitcoin like money has been abandonded and it's merely a "store of value". That's until people stop valuing it.
Money and payment settlement systems are not the same thing, although you could be forgiven for believing that. I use a credit card for 99% of my transaction volume, and credit cards are not money. The fact that the notional value of the transaction is denominated in dollars doesn't mean I am actually using dollars as the medium of exchange--the exchange is facilitated by a clearinghouse and my individual transaction may not even result in a transfer of money (actual dollars) between parties, if there is an offsetting transaction (or chain of transactions) within the same settlement period.
Bitcoin was originally invented as a "peer to peer electronic cash system". The fees have made it impossible to use it as such for quite some time.
Do you mean voting? Has been around since ancient Greece.
in fact, i would even argue that btc's stance is closer to middle ground as they are clearly working towards making it easier to run all sorts of wild experiments in the upper layers while protecting and minimizing what's going on in the base layer.
You might benefit--expand your mind--by reading some classical economists' thoughts on such things.
I've stated numbers above.
While I appreciate the hilarity of invoking classical economics to justify vague Bitcoin maximalism, we are talking about something 6 million times more energy efficient, with infinitely lower fees, and well over a thousand times faster. It's objectively better on every technical front.
They included the biggest miners and overall > 50% of the mining power as far as I could tell.
>The mechanics I'm referring to are in the 50+ page document that I read,
I wish you'd specify what mechanic in particular you think others misunderstood and you didn't, as I included the main ones from their arguments.
Point #1 is a big one. A huge number of people thought that fees would go down.
I didn't ask whether promises were eventually broken, I asked how long the warning was.
Also if we talk about the promises, I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.
> I'm pretty sure proof of work was supposed to be dead years ago. The current state is more than promised.
That's a fair point
It would have required a radical redesign of bitcoin to even have a chance of success, and that has always been off the table and has been left for new, experimental digital currencies.
The power is split but the constant "fights" between the different parties (miners/users) is the reasons these fist-gen (PoW/PoS) blockchains can not be efficient. There is and forever will be a misaligned interest between the two parties which drives up prices and slows down progress.
Software's auto-update feature is completely irrelevant to consensus. It obviously does not define who has the power at all. To update is always voluntary. Software devs dont technically have any power they have influence.
This has been demonstrated empirically numerous times in crypto history, most notably the moment that >80% of the hashrate openly supported a hardfork that subsequently failed because it did not have user support.
Your node software decides what fork you run on. If someone can push an update to your software without your consent, they can choose to put you on a fork and you may not even realize it happened. This is why most full node software (including bitcoin and Ethereum) does not support automatic updates.
This is based on the assumption that miners would rather choose to abandon their business as a matter of principle than mine on the most profitable chain, and also somehow convince any future, unaffiliated prospective miners to also do the same. How could they ever achieve that? Miners don't control where the financial incentives are.
The power is split between miners and user. A majority from both parties are required to determine where the network goes the rest are somewhat forced to follow. If no such majority can be found the network can fork and both chains can be profitable for miners. I never said miners are in control, I disagreed with the parent who said users are in control - big difference.
> A hard fork is determined by the users, who have to upgrade their software.
Who are 'the users' here? Light clients? Users of wallets? None of these have the power to adopt a fork, soft or hard. The collective action of the miners (or validators) defines which chains still retain liveness. For example in the hard fork between Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ethereum (ETH) ETC was able to exist only because miners chose to to mine it. This in turn did give non-mining users the choice of how to distribute their demand and create extrinsic value for the ETC token. I wouldn't say this gives non-mining users any control over a hard fork since it happens after-the-fact.
> If the software updates automatically, then the power of hard forking lies with the developers
I don't know of a node distribution for Ethereum that works this way.
The core developers have power as in knowledge and power as in authority, the later being the traditional form of political power.
The ETC fork would have been successful at any non-zero support level from people with the ability to mine. And since any CPU can mine (just inefficiently), any fork can get a mining baseline. That may not give you a ton of security but it works.
People who run full nodes are the ones that decide hard forks.
> The ETC fork would have been successful at any non-zero support level from people with the ability to mine.
It would be economically irrational for people to send transactions to a fork with a single miner since that miner could unilaterally rewrite any transactions as they see fit. This is why I think miners have the ability to control forking.
Kinda funny how this problem was solved before ETH even existed simply by removing the incentive for the hardware operator. No block rewards and no fees to collect aka no reason to fight over it. The only people who run the hardware without getting paid for it are the people who want to use it. They have aligned interest like a fast and cheap network and fast update cycles. And ofc no one who has to pay for the hardware and energy has any interest in PoW.
A fork is generally considered successful if it carries economic value. That is decided by the amount of users transacting in the currency. Working exchanges are a requirement for this, but not enough (as has been experimentally demonstrated).
Of course the proposals are still heavily focused on internal/ecosystem development but there's an increasing focus on building platforms for people in developing regions as well. There has generally been a heavy focus on improving connectivity and access to affordable financial services within the African continent however recently there's been slowly growing focus on other regions with large unbanked or under-banked populations.
With the amount of money that is allotted via the treasury for the Cardano ecosystem, Catalyst (and eventually proper on-chain governance when it evolves into that) has funding to comfortably run it's 6 week cadence funding rounds indefinitely at a rate of 15 million USD per round once it finished scaling up. As the network grows the scale will likely increase but regardless I think with the focuses the community has (particularly thanks to West Africa Decentralised Alliance) we'll see increasing focus on improving infrastructure and access in developing regions.
And while you could argue that many of the solutions proposed have some net positive effect flowing back to the ecosystem, generally the focus has been on connecting people rather than driving traffic to the network.
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Sorry if that got a little long winded. It's a cool project+community and we've been working really hard to avoid the toxic coin maximalist & self-centred behaviour that's become so incredibly common in the space.
BTC maximalists are quasi-religious in my experience but Cardano just seems to recognize the inevitable ascension of the blockchain and is building for that future, very similar to Ethereum.
Maybe he's full of it; I've encountered other comments criticizing him but none that were deifying.
The Project Catalyst community, the official IOG developer discord, and even the Cardano subreddits (r/Cardano, r/Cardano_ELI5, r/CardanoDevelopers, etc) to a less extent aren't caught up in this cult mentality so much. When Charles says something stupid, innapropriate, or unbecoming, people are not afraid to address it in these spaces. On r/CryptoCurrency or on twitter it's a different story but Twitter is a cesspool (especially for any cryptocurrency) and while we try to call out the zealots on r/CC, it's not particularly easy.
In those dedicated Cardano spaces though, there is a marked effort to avoid the cult mentality and redirect that energy towards focusing on actual projects.
Very few people (in these communities) have the belief that somehow Cardano is going to be the dominant cryptocurrency or is going to "take over the world" so to speak. There is a strong belief that the project will be successful and a strong ecosystem is forming around it but not that it renders other chains irrelevant or that it must grow at any cost including via the minimisation or attacking of other networks. The general consensus is that it will make a strong showing and settle into a reasonably solid position in the greater financial ecosystem where it'll be intertwined with and coexisting with legacy financial systems and the other major cryptocurrency networks.
TLDR: Every topic/space has zealots unfortunately but looking at their core communities I've found Cardano to be generally fairly resistant to this behaviour. It's not a perfect community by any means but out of all the communities I'm involved in, I've seen more people in the Cardano ecosystem go out of their way to walk others away from maximalist behaviour or zealotry than any other community. I've been around for quite a while and I've seen how the different communities have evolved so I like to believe I've gotten a reasonably comprehensive view of the communities but no person can see everything and in the end this is all anecdotal experiences.
Could you maybe provide some examples of these /real/ problems they want to focus on? No DYOR, since you seem to be actually involved in the project.
Providing banking services for under-banked regions is yet again, for the crypto. Avoiding KYC is not a feature; I would argue that developing countries need robust infrastructure that incorporates societal laws, for positive outcomes.
Catalyst just recently funded a proposal for a decentralised pharmaceuticals project that is initially basing out of Southern(?) African nations (primarily SA atm I believe). Initially I believe it is focused on aggregating the information and technology necessary for some common life saving medications. The end goal is to provide easy access to process knowledge so as to reduce the barriers of entry for local organisations to start (or improve) production of and access to medications. This project is definitely a bit of a long shot and it'll need more funding than what it got so far but provided their regular reporting looks good, odds are they'll be able to come back for additional funding rounds until they can ramp up to a sustainable model. IDK if it'll work but I wish them the best.
Another proposal was funded to attempt rolling out food traceability solutions in I think Western Africa to help farmers get easier access to global markets (rather than being stuck selling to a megacorp that then resells for much higher).
Additionally, the next funding round has a category dedicated to projects that are focused on micro-finance on the African continent (think Kiva loans) which has the potential to significantly improve the lives of farmers and people starting small businesses.
I would go into the other Project Catalyst projects more but Catalyst is still in it's early stages (scaling up is happening but it won't be at 100% until the end of the year) so there aren't a tonne of funded projects overall yet. There were some other projects that didn't get funded but they generally had issues that need to be resolved before they are really even worth discussing. We are still ironing out some of the issues with the whole process so it's been a bit of a bumpy road so far.
Also of note is World Mobile. They are in the same space and are rolling out a decentralised ISP network in Tanzania focused on providing at least basic wifi connectivity to rural villages.
Of course all of these projects are generally aiming to produce some kind of income at the end of the day but that's not inherently a bad thing as it promotes making the projects sustainable (rather than relying on outside funding). Additionally one of the goals with these projects is to try and jump start or otherwise stimulate the economies they are targetting so approaching from a business approach rather than a purely altruistic approach could potentially yield better results.
Also they all generally use cryptocurrency/decentralised tech in some capacity but it's not like the cryptocurrency itself is the focus. The community has a cryptocurrency focus so it's common to see people approach the solutions from that perspective.
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> I would argue that developing countries need robust infrastructure that incorporates societal laws, for positive outcomes.
I agree and generally that's been the consensus in the community as well. The overwhelming theme has been to try and be as non-disruptive (in a negative sense) as possible. Progress is slow if it's to be successful in most cases and the last thing you want to do is to cause upset in the local communities. As an anecdote, at least in the Catalyst community all the projects I've seen that are "boots on the ground" type projects have had a strong focus on doing things by the books and not accidentally stepping on any toes along the way.
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I hope that addresses everything. If you have any questions let me know. I'm a bit strapped on time so I may not be on HN for a day or two but I'll eventually be around and I'll respond when I can.
For sure it will always be voted on something that is good for the chain or for the token. When its good publicity for a chain to vote for charity-baking you could solve human problems.
This is their mission, and the rest of the website focuses on ID and such services. Not one mention of poverty alleviation.
But anyway these edge-cases are irrelevant. There is and will never be a situation where all miners and all user chose a different chain. Just the fact that some miners are users at the same time makes it impossible. The only thing important is that power is shared between the 2 groups and its a constant fight because of different interests. Even without miners when its fully PoS there will still be misaligned interests between the parties (users, hardware operators, stakes etc.)
Its an inherent flaw in the system because it relies on incentives which one party wants to maximize.
This sound like a worthwhile project which could be run by a group of passionate supporters. Why does it need a blockchain?
It's mostly just a convenient and transparent way to fund R&D as well as to allow supporters/participants a controlling voice in the operation of the organisation.
Here's a link to their proposal. You may have to create an ideascale account to access it but if that's the case and you don't want to do that, let me know and I can mirror it over in a comment here.
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Africa-Opensource-Pharma...
sybil-proofing in blockchain systems opens the possibility for any person or community to take a shot at implementing UBI. Could someone succeed in creating a token that retains some level of value long term and also consistently tops up at some rate in everyone's wallet? Beats me. But sybil-proofing is absolutely blocking issue on that front.
Making this token retain some sort of value is of course an entirely different problem, and I don't have strong opinions on whether someone might pull it off.