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Having been introduced to cryptocurrencies the technical route, I'd never really been exposed to the brand of hype in these Andreas Antonopoulos videos before.

by cowpig 9y ago

Having been introduced to cryptocurrencies the technical route, I'd never really been exposed to the brand of hype in these Andreas Antonopoulos videos before. I guess I've never watched a televangelist either, but I imagine this would be the equivalent. This piece of bullshit in particular stood out to me: > Where were you when libor was fixed? Where were you when gold markets were fixed? When high-frequency traders used front-running... It's odd that he uses these examples to support the "trustless" blockchain architecture, because blockchain does nothing to improve any of these. The opposite is true: it makes it far easier to manipulate markets because all transactions are anonymous, censorship-proof, and it's impossible to recover funds from bad actors. Not having to trust a central authority for the ledger does nothing to prevent collusion or frontrunning in markets. From what I've seen, cryptocurrency markets are constantly being manipulated in ways that are both unethical and illegal. > Bitcoin vs Ethereum is like Sharks vs Lions... He claims that Bitcoin specializes in ways that Ethereum does not, but this isn't true: effectively, Bitcoin is a subset of Ethereum. He claims that Ethereum "scales 10x worse" than Bitcoin, but I don't know where he got that number from: the reality is more nuanced, but by any practical measure, Ethereum is already better-equipped to scale and the protocol is actively evolving (as opposed to Bitcoin's, which is immutable as long as its community remains as toxic as it currently does). If he means the size of the full blockchain, in practice Ethereum implements compression techniques that make it much more compact--the Bitcoin blockchain is currently at about 100gb, while the uncompressed "archival" version of Ethereum is at 300gb but the standard compressed version only requires about 15gb. In terms of transaction throughput, Bitcoin has a stupid hard limit of 1mb per 10mins of data, and so Ethereum far outscales it in that regard. If you hear the term "lightning network" as a counterargument, you can ignore it: the lightning network doesn't yet exist, and when it does, it will have several practical problems, including that it requires onchain scaling to work[1]. [1] http://cowpig.github.io/bitcoin/cryptocurrency/2017/06/24/Segwit-and-Lightning-Network/ http://cowpig.github.io/bitcoin/cryptocurrency/2017/06/24/Se...

Kiro 9y ago
What's your opinion on Raiden then?
- cowpig 9y ago
  The whole timelocked channels idea makes sense in situations where you have one central hub (like an exchange) or two parties transacting with each other a ton. It doesn't work as a replacement for transactions generally, though.
dsacco 9y ago
> This piece of bullshit in particular stood out to me: > Where were you when libor was fixed? Where were you when gold markets were fixed? When high-frequency traders used front-running... It's odd that he uses these examples to support the "trustless" blockchain architecture, because blockchain does nothing to improve any of these. The opposite is true: it makes it far easier to manipulate markets because all transactions are anonymous, censorship-proof, and it's impossible to recover funds from bad actors. It’s deeply frustrating hearing someone who is ostensibly an evangelist say these things. It’s actually worse than what you’re saying - not only does he demonstrate a lack of understanding about a blockchain’s market capabilities, he evidences a basic lack of understanding about the market. For example, I don’t know what it’s going to take for people to understand that high frequency trading isn’t front-running. It’s frightening to me that a “thought leader” on stage can mention something so incorrect in passing and the audience will mostly just nod their heads and internalize it. If this person can’t be bothered to understand the very basic, cursory characteristics of his examples, what else can’t I trust him to tell me correctly that I can’t immediately figure out is wrong information? It’s like being educated about a subject from someone who reads only the article headlines and top comments of stories on the front page of reddit. When I hear or read a claim that is 1) confident, 2) definitive, 3) utterly incorrect, I simply disengage from that person. It’s one thing to be ignorant and willing to be educated. It’s another thing entirely to assume a mantle of authority and promulgate this misinformation. It signals to me that the person is either incapable of, or unwilling to use critical thinking.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  While I agree with the gist of your comment (and would add that I think HFT is great for the economy as it boosts the liquidity of capital markets), some HFT trading does involve front-running in the sense that financial institutions invest in infrastructure to reduce latency for their HFT traders in order to trade on information not widely available to the public
  - dsacco 9y ago
    > some HFT trading does involve front-running in the sense that financial institutions invest in infrastructure to reduce latency for their HFT traders in order to trade on information not widely available to the public ...which is not front-running, nor is it illegal. This is exactly what I'm talking about. These words have a very specific legal definition - this is not a case of, "I wish people still used the word 'hacker' like they did in the 80s!". There is no vernacular drift; ascribing the term "front-running" to high frequency trading is virtually always incorrect. Its continued use muddles any attempt at legitimate discussion about the subject because there are several groups of people involved who: 1. understand both HFT and front-running, and do not use the latter to describe the former. 2. understand neither HFT nor front-running, and conflate the two liberally, 3. understand HFT but not front-running, and use the latter to describe the former, 4. understand front-running but not HFT, and "borrow" the former term to describe the latter (inappropriately). ...etc. Throw in ideological bias and you get a debate in which everyone talks past each other and no one learns anything.
Asdfbla 9y ago
Yeah, if you are interested in the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies it can be really frustrating because there's so much bullshit and unsubstantiated hype out there. It's as hyped as deep learning, but I guess at least there the field is not as politicized by economics and therefore a bit less prone to the evangelist type of person (similar amount of marketing going on though). Maybe it's best to ignore anything in medium blog form or similar that wants to explain the blockchain to you. Fortunately, the field is mature enough that there are learning resources by people who know what they are doing out now (for instance the Bitcoin technology book by Arvind Narayanan and others seems pretty good).
keymone 9y ago
Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and keeps blockchain size in check. Already you wouldn’t be able to sync the ethereum chain from genesis block, I can still do that on raspberry pi node in less than two weeks. Whether the limit should be upped is still a question up for debate but the reason it wasn’t yet is because there was no consensus about it and contentious hardforks are dangerous.
- cowpig 9y ago
  > Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. I've heard this a few times online despite not really knowing anything about Roger Ver. I am capable of coming to logical conclusions on my own. > 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and keeps blockchain size in check. Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20, an order of magnitude more than my bank transfers cost. > Already you wouldn’t be able to sync the ethereum chain from genesis block, I can still do that on raspberry pi node in less than two weeks. I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. > Whether the limit should be upped is still a question up for debate This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate, or that we should do something about climate change is up for debate, or that net neutrality is up for debate: there are powerful self-interested actors for whom the obvious conclusion is expensive.
  - keymone 9y ago
    > Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20 you've cherry-picked the exact point in time when due to various factors ("civil war" between bitcoin and bitcoin cash supporters, propaganda campaigns, price rally) transaction fees are at their peak. if you look at the graph - https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all you'll realize that for majority of this year transaction fees were well below 50c. this is what happens if you blindly believe the echo chamber. besides, i'm not convinved all and every transaction belong on the chain. chain provides bunch of very strong guarantees that no other system in the world provides - it's ridiculous to claim that those guarantees are not worth anything. > I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. lol, nope. let me guess, `geth --fast`? well, i suggest you go read up on what `--fast` means. i challenge you to try syncing from the genesis block. > This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate no, it is literally up for debate. there is a multitude of bottlenecks involved in having a healthy blockchain and a network around it, they are all affected by bumping the blocksize in non-trivial ways through secondary and tertiary effects. and it's not even obvious we can handle the primary effect of growing blockchain and utxo set - that quite literally leads to centralization of full nodes via making it prohibitively expensive to run it which runs against one of the core tenets of bitcoin itself.
xorcist 9y ago
> Bitcoin is a subset of Ethereum This is not true at all, and a strange statement to make from someone who identifies with the technical side of cryptocurrencies. Ethereum made two important departures from the Bitcoin design. One is to have accounts instead of unspent transactions (UTXOs). We don't know if Satoshi considered an account based design first, but it is not unlikely since it is a design one is likely to think of first. We can however make an educated guess as to why the UTXO model was chosen instead. It enables SPV wallets which is mentioned as early as in the whitepaper. Ethereum can not have thin and trustless wallets by design. SPV wallets wasn't really as straightforward as people thought them to be, and one design isn't necessarily "better" than the other, but one is not a subset of the other. The other important change was bytecode to support compiling from popular languages, such as javascript, instead of specialized bytecodes to support the low level operations of the protocol. This is a different design that requires changes to other aspects of the protocol, including the fee model to a price on execution time. Bitcoin programs are supposed to anchor to the chain, not completely live on it. If crypto kittens were written for Bitcoin instead of Ethereum, they would need to have certain logic off chain but track things like ownership on chain. (Compare for exampel with the Lighthouse model.) This is a different model, which is only semi on-chain and would therefore scale better. Doing the same operations to the contract requires more transactions and produces more data in the Ethereum model. So Bitcoin would likely continue to function where Ethereum struggles (to the point where big exchanges just turn off their Ethereum processing when large events such as big ICOs happens). > the uncompressed "archival" version of Ethereum is at 300gb but the standard compressed version only requires about 15gb It is not interesting how big the chain is but how fast it grows. Transaction throughput is capacity, not scaling. Scaling is a measure of change. And Etherum growth is concerning to the developers. Have you tried running a full node? I have. Even a beefy machine with SSD takes weeks to bootstrap, and the load is getting worse over time, not better. It's not clear for how long this can be kept up. Sure, you can trust a third party to deliver you the blockchain. But someone must independently audit the blockchain, otherwise we would be much better off by running audited Postgres nodes at trusted institutions (like the global DNS infrastructure works) than just trusting a Foundation. The "compressed" Bitcoin blockchain, by comparison, is as small as 1 GB and just as functional. But the comparison is uninteresting, because any application that can make do with such a heavily pruned blockchain would probably be better off with an SPV architecture. Please don't read this is some sort of comparison or defense of Bitcoin's architecture. One is not "better" than the other. Ethereum changed a few fundamental design decisions and the result is different, therefore the use cases are different. One is certainly not a subset of the other.
pm7 9y ago
> If he means the size of the full blockchain, in practice Ethereum implements compression techniques that make it much more compact--the Bitcoin blockchain is currently at about 100gb, while the uncompressed "archival" version of Ethereum is at 300gb but the standard compressed version only requires about 15gb. Are you referring to "pruning"? Bitcoin can do this too and pruning is not compression as it cause big information loss (you need to download information from other, non-pruning nodes if you want to bootstrap new one).
- cowpig 9y ago
  I do mean pruning, which for most practical use-cases is fine, and also the patricia tree compression
philipwhiuk 9y ago
The Lightning Network is apparently live: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/468 https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/468 The title makes you less confident, the comment: > At any given point, we may be sending an additional satoshi to miner's fees. This is a result of the internal usage of milli-satoshis and our policy of always rounding down (to go from mSAT -> SAT) makes you deeply skeptical.
Frogolocalypse 9y ago
> Ethereum is already better-equipped to scale and the protocol is actively evolving That is laughably false. Ethereum node decentralization is cratering, because it is becoming impossible to even synchronize a node anymore. I'd suggest you're not as technically inclined as you assert if you don't recognize this. > In terms of transaction throughput, Bitcoin has a stupid hard limit of 1mb per 10mins of data Bitcoin has a hard-limit in order to protect the decentralization of its nodes, and the consensus rules of the protocol. It's OK, I suppose, if you don't mind forking a supposedly immutable blockchain every time a few big investors lose money, but bitcoin is a slightly better value proposition than that.
throw_away_999 9y ago
I stumbled upon Andreas Antonopoulos when we were both in London, circa 1997. I met him 2-3 times, we had some common friends trough UCL. He did not make a good impression on me. Arrogant, smart ass and somehow shady. My impression was that actually nobody liked him or had a good opinion on him, even his close friends. Anyway, just my 2 cents.

by cowpig 9y ago

Kiro 9y ago

What's your opinion on Raiden then?

cowpig 9y ago
The whole timelocked channels idea makes sense in situations where you have one central hub (like an exchange) or two parties transacting with each other a ton. It doesn't work as a replacement for transactions generally, though.

dsacco 9y ago

> This piece of bullshit in particular stood out to me: > Where were you when libor was fixed? Where were you when gold markets were fixed? When high-frequency traders used front-running... It's odd that he uses these examples to support the "trustless" blockchain architecture, because blockchain does nothing to improve any of these. The opposite is true: it makes it far easier to manipulate markets because all transactions are anonymous, censorship-proof, and it's impossible to recover funds from bad actors. It’s deeply frustrating hearing someone who is ostensibly an evangelist say these things. It’s actually worse than what you’re saying - not only does he demonstrate a lack of understanding about a blockchain’s market capabilities, he evidences a basic lack of understanding about the market. For example, I don’t know what it’s going to take for people to understand that high frequency trading isn’t front-running. It’s frightening to me that a “thought leader” on stage can mention something so incorrect in passing and the audience will mostly just nod their heads and internalize it. If this person can’t be bothered to understand the very basic, cursory characteristics of his examples, what else can’t I trust him to tell me correctly that I can’t immediately figure out is wrong information? It’s like being educated about a subject from someone who reads only the article headlines and top comments of stories on the front page of reddit. When I hear or read a claim that is 1) confident, 2) definitive, 3) utterly incorrect, I simply disengage from that person. It’s one thing to be ignorant and willing to be educated. It’s another thing entirely to assume a mantle of authority and promulgate this misinformation. It signals to me that the person is either incapable of, or unwilling to use critical thinking.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
While I agree with the gist of your comment (and would add that I think HFT is great for the economy as it boosts the liquidity of capital markets), some HFT trading does involve front-running in the sense that financial institutions invest in infrastructure to reduce latency for their HFT traders in order to trade on information not widely available to the public
- dsacco 9y ago
  > some HFT trading does involve front-running in the sense that financial institutions invest in infrastructure to reduce latency for their HFT traders in order to trade on information not widely available to the public ...which is not front-running, nor is it illegal. This is exactly what I'm talking about. These words have a very specific legal definition - this is not a case of, "I wish people still used the word 'hacker' like they did in the 80s!". There is no vernacular drift; ascribing the term "front-running" to high frequency trading is virtually always incorrect. Its continued use muddles any attempt at legitimate discussion about the subject because there are several groups of people involved who: 1. understand both HFT and front-running, and do not use the latter to describe the former. 2. understand neither HFT nor front-running, and conflate the two liberally, 3. understand HFT but not front-running, and use the latter to describe the former, 4. understand front-running but not HFT, and "borrow" the former term to describe the latter (inappropriately). ...etc. Throw in ideological bias and you get a debate in which everyone talks past each other and no one learns anything.

Asdfbla 9y ago

Yeah, if you are interested in the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies it can be really frustrating because there's so much bullshit and unsubstantiated hype out there. It's as hyped as deep learning, but I guess at least there the field is not as politicized by economics and therefore a bit less prone to the evangelist type of person (similar amount of marketing going on though). Maybe it's best to ignore anything in medium blog form or similar that wants to explain the blockchain to you. Fortunately, the field is mature enough that there are learning resources by people who know what they are doing out now (for instance the Bitcoin technology book by Arvind Narayanan and others seems pretty good).

keymone 9y ago

Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and keeps blockchain size in check. Already you wouldn’t be able to sync the ethereum chain from genesis block, I can still do that on raspberry pi node in less than two weeks. Whether the limit should be upped is still a question up for debate but the reason it wasn’t yet is because there was no consensus about it and contentious hardforks are dangerous.

cowpig 9y ago
> Seems you’ve bought into Roger Ver’s snake oil. I've heard this a few times online despite not really knowing anything about Roger Ver. I am capable of coming to logical conclusions on my own. > 1mb limit isn’t stupid, it’s what creates the fee market which makes spamming the blockchain very costly and keeps blockchain size in check. Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20, an order of magnitude more than my bank transfers cost. > Already you wouldn’t be able to sync the ethereum chain from genesis block, I can still do that on raspberry pi node in less than two weeks. I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. > Whether the limit should be upped is still a question up for debate This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate, or that we should do something about climate change is up for debate, or that net neutrality is up for debate: there are powerful self-interested actors for whom the obvious conclusion is expensive.
- keymone 9y ago
  > Very costly in the sense that an individual Bitcoin transaction curently costs about $20 you've cherry-picked the exact point in time when due to various factors ("civil war" between bitcoin and bitcoin cash supporters, propaganda campaigns, price rally) transaction fees are at their peak. if you look at the graph - https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#all you'll realize that for majority of this year transaction fees were well below 50c. this is what happens if you blindly believe the echo chamber. besides, i'm not convinved all and every transaction belong on the chain. chain provides bunch of very strong guarantees that no other system in the world provides - it's ridiculous to claim that those guarantees are not worth anything. > I literally synced the Ethereum chain on my laptop last weekend. lol, nope. let me guess, `geth --fast`? well, i suggest you go read up on what `--fast` means. i challenge you to try syncing from the genesis block. > This is only true if you are using the phrase "up for debate" in the sense that smoking being bad for you is up for debate no, it is literally up for debate. there is a multitude of bottlenecks involved in having a healthy blockchain and a network around it, they are all affected by bumping the blocksize in non-trivial ways through secondary and tertiary effects. and it's not even obvious we can handle the primary effect of growing blockchain and utxo set - that quite literally leads to centralization of full nodes via making it prohibitively expensive to run it which runs against one of the core tenets of bitcoin itself.

xorcist 9y ago

> Bitcoin is a subset of Ethereum This is not true at all, and a strange statement to make from someone who identifies with the technical side of cryptocurrencies. Ethereum made two important departures from the Bitcoin design. One is to have accounts instead of unspent transactions (UTXOs). We don't know if Satoshi considered an account based design first, but it is not unlikely since it is a design one is likely to think of first. We can however make an educated guess as to why the UTXO model was chosen instead. It enables SPV wallets which is mentioned as early as in the whitepaper. Ethereum can not have thin and trustless wallets by design. SPV wallets wasn't really as straightforward as people thought them to be, and one design isn't necessarily "better" than the other, but one is not a subset of the other. The other important change was bytecode to support compiling from popular languages, such as javascript, instead of specialized bytecodes to support the low level operations of the protocol. This is a different design that requires changes to other aspects of the protocol, including the fee model to a price on execution time. Bitcoin programs are supposed to anchor to the chain, not completely live on it. If crypto kittens were written for Bitcoin instead of Ethereum, they would need to have certain logic off chain but track things like ownership on chain. (Compare for exampel with the Lighthouse model.) This is a different model, which is only semi on-chain and would therefore scale better. Doing the same operations to the contract requires more transactions and produces more data in the Ethereum model. So Bitcoin would likely continue to function where Ethereum struggles (to the point where big exchanges just turn off their Ethereum processing when large events such as big ICOs happens). > the uncompressed "archival" version of Ethereum is at 300gb but the standard compressed version only requires about 15gb It is not interesting how big the chain is but how fast it grows. Transaction throughput is capacity, not scaling. Scaling is a measure of change. And Etherum growth is concerning to the developers. Have you tried running a full node? I have. Even a beefy machine with SSD takes weeks to bootstrap, and the load is getting worse over time, not better. It's not clear for how long this can be kept up. Sure, you can trust a third party to deliver you the blockchain. But someone must independently audit the blockchain, otherwise we would be much better off by running audited Postgres nodes at trusted institutions (like the global DNS infrastructure works) than just trusting a Foundation. The "compressed" Bitcoin blockchain, by comparison, is as small as 1 GB and just as functional. But the comparison is uninteresting, because any application that can make do with such a heavily pruned blockchain would probably be better off with an SPV architecture. Please don't read this is some sort of comparison or defense of Bitcoin's architecture. One is not "better" than the other. Ethereum changed a few fundamental design decisions and the result is different, therefore the use cases are different. One is certainly not a subset of the other.

pm7 9y ago

> If he means the size of the full blockchain, in practice Ethereum implements compression techniques that make it much more compact--the Bitcoin blockchain is currently at about 100gb, while the uncompressed "archival" version of Ethereum is at 300gb but the standard compressed version only requires about 15gb. Are you referring to "pruning"? Bitcoin can do this too and pruning is not compression as it cause big information loss (you need to download information from other, non-pruning nodes if you want to bootstrap new one).

cowpig 9y ago
I do mean pruning, which for most practical use-cases is fine, and also the patricia tree compression

philipwhiuk 9y ago

The Lightning Network is apparently live: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/468 https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/468 The title makes you less confident, the comment: > At any given point, we may be sending an additional satoshi to miner's fees. This is a result of the internal usage of milli-satoshis and our policy of always rounding down (to go from mSAT -> SAT) makes you deeply skeptical.

Frogolocalypse 9y ago

> Ethereum is already better-equipped to scale and the protocol is actively evolving That is laughably false. Ethereum node decentralization is cratering, because it is becoming impossible to even synchronize a node anymore. I'd suggest you're not as technically inclined as you assert if you don't recognize this. > In terms of transaction throughput, Bitcoin has a stupid hard limit of 1mb per 10mins of data Bitcoin has a hard-limit in order to protect the decentralization of its nodes, and the consensus rules of the protocol. It's OK, I suppose, if you don't mind forking a supposedly immutable blockchain every time a few big investors lose money, but bitcoin is a slightly better value proposition than that.

throw_away_999 9y ago

I stumbled upon Andreas Antonopoulos when we were both in London, circa 1997. I met him 2-3 times, we had some common friends trough UCL. He did not make a good impression on me. Arrogant, smart ass and somehow shady. My impression was that actually nobody liked him or had a good opinion on him, even his close friends. Anyway, just my 2 cents.