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You can see the state (volume, # daily users) of some of these promised "dapps" here: https://dappradar.com https://dappradar.com . It is indeed a barren wastel
by hudon 8y ago
You can see the state (volume, # daily users) of some of these promised "dapps" here: https://dappradar.com https://dappradar.com . It is indeed a barren wasteland. And when a new popular ICO comes along, the Ethereum network struggles and fees skyrocket.
It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the network, which was incredibly useful to academia and the military and was orders of magnitude more efficient than any alternative.
Now, all we see is rampant fraud and a complete disregard for the environment [0] with no gain in efficiency. It's high time we hold "crypto-anarchists" accountable for these issues.
[0] The Ethereum network consumes more electricity than Iceland https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
- ZirconCode 8y agoWhat if we make a currency where each ICO is one coin?
- jerguismi 8y ago> It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the network, which was incredibly useful to academia and the military and was orders of magnitude more efficient than any alternative. How is running an ICO not useful to people? Get lot of money with only doing a lousy whitepaper, drive ferrari and live luxury life rest of your life. No joking, many people can't imagine anything better.
- nkozyra 8y agoIf you consider being the beneficiary of a boom in what is effectively fraud a "good thing," sure. I can driver a Ferrari if I literally rob people, too, but most people would consider the people I've hurt in the process when evaluating the merits of my actions.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoI think that's the joke; that there are at least enough of those unethical people that they can make money off it.
- jerguismi 8y agoWhat does the market say? ICOs seem to be very popular so effectively quite a lot of people seem to consider them a good thing, at least currently. Does useful mean the same as ethical? Those people do ICO's to raise money from other people, and it seems to work for them.
- babygoat 8y ago>Get lot of money with only doing a lousy whitepaper, drive ferrari and live luxury life rest of your life. Sounds easy!
- bendavis381 8y agoThis is a serious question as I want to make sure I'm reading this right: CryptoKitties really had only 274 users in the past 24 hours? The USV/Andreessen company?
- hudon 8y agoYes, another source is here: http://www.rolldice.club/cryptokitties/ http://www.rolldice.club/cryptokitties/ It's worth noting that at its peak when CryptoKitties transactions hogged the Ethereum network and made it barely useable, CryptoKitties had only 14k users.
- mockingbirdy 8y agoSome things scale horizontally, some things scale vertically. But some things scale diagonally. If I would build a system that gets DoS'd with 14k users I would get fired faster than the latest startup burns through VC money.
- drcode 8y agoTo be fair, there's a known solution to the cryptokitty scalability problem (a particular type of "plasma chain" tuned for nonfungible tokens) and this is being worked on and will likely see the light of day pretty soon. This of course does not solve the bigger problem: the small user base.
- mockingbirdy 8y agoGreat. Now we just need enough spoiled rich 12yo girls and some get-rich-quick guys that bid on some imaginary kitties.
- Animats 8y agoRight. I was thinking about combining CryptoKitties and Second Life type breedable animals to make collectable ponies you could go play with and show off in virtual reality. But no.
- 8y ago
- protonimitate 8y ago>>It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning Exactly why so much wealth was created by the Internet boom. The wealth came from utility that already existed, just needed to be harnessed to its fullest potential. ICO scams are based on generating wealth first and hoping that utility follows at some undetermined time in the future. It's all snake oil. Maybe snake oil can be useful to someone at some point in time, but until then it's still just a scam.
- mockingbirdy 8y agoSnake oil is actually very useful: https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/oils/snake-oil.html https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/oils/snake-oil.... My superpower: Taking things literally. Still more useful than the last 10 ICOs. And my bad jokes aren't as bad for the environment. 10k joke-coins pre-ICO and 2 downvotes for that one for me! We had three innovative ideas in the financial sector - certificate of debt, compounded interest and book money. And now the fourth - trolling idiots to risk their retirement money because they want to get rich "with that computer money my son told me about".
- s73v3r_ 8y agoCan we offer an ICO for tokenized "taking things literally" jokes?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- paulmd 8y agoWhat about an options market for jokes that may be taken literally in the future? r/memeeconomy but irl, if you will.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 8y ago
- NathanCH 8y agoGlobal network consumes more energy than tiny, sparsely populated country. Hmm.
- foepys 8y agoIceland has some heavy industry like aluminum smelting which requires massive amounts of electricity. The energy consumption is also including private households. Meanwhile Ethereum is handling currently less than 1,000 users in its core business: dApps.
- chrisco255 8y agoDAPP Radar is not the authoritative source for all Ethereum applications. There are many like Augur, Golem, MakerDAI, etc that aren't even included on that list. Depends on when "early days of internet" is defined? The internet could be seen as an evolution of ARPAnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET which was defined in the mid-1960s and took years to deploy and probably decades to evolve to the usefulness you describe. ETH network is moving to a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm which will reduce it's electricity impact: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs And meanwhile, there are other blockchains, like Qtum, that are already Proof-of-Stake and run Ethereum VM and create blocks on Raspberry Pis, for minimal energy consumption: https://github.com/qtumproject/qtum/wiki/Installing-Qtum-on-Raspberry-Pi https://github.com/qtumproject/qtum/wiki/Installing-Qtum-on-...
- hudon 8y agoAs per your citation, ARPAnet came online in 1969 and emails were being exchanged by 1972, barely 3 years later. Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any.
- xur17 8y ago> Blockchains have been around for 10 years now and every year they cause bigger problems without actually solving any. Being able to transfer value between two parties without having to trust anyone has value. We can argue about how much value, but it's non-zero.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> without having to trust anyone has value There is a lot of trust involved in a cryptocurrency transfer. You have to trust your technical competence to securely mount your wallet. You have to trust the wallet you're sending money to is the wallet it's supposed to go to. You have to trust the person you're sending money todo what you're paying them to. You have to trust the network to maintain the value and convertibility of the currency you're sending and receiving. Et cetera, et cetera In practice, nobody wants to do these things. So we see centralization at exchanges. Precisely in the way people not wanting to handle cash use banks.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoThe early internet I used was just as barely usable as the Ethereum network is now. I remember being in the college computer lab and begging on simple things like a page to load. Just a few years later and I was able to watch videos on the computers streaming from the internet. Technology rapidly advances. I still realized back in those computer labs how revolutionary the internet was going to be, I feel the same way about crypto now.
- floren 8y agoThat's the early web. The early Internet was connecting universities, companies, and government sites two decades before the web came around.
- confiscate 8y agoWhat attributes about crypto, makes you feel the same way? i.e. that it is going to be revolutionary Because the example you said about the internet (from loading webpage to video streaming) does sound amazing. What's the "parallel" for crypto that you see?
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agohttps://i.redd.it/l5y9p9nqwu811.png https://i.redd.it/l5y9p9nqwu811.png This sums it up better than I could. The wrenching of power away from centralized authorities and organizations (which we have seen abuse us and our privacy mercilessly for their gain) to decentralized applications with no middlemen, that are free of censorship, and can not be "stopped."
- confiscate 8y agoI want crypto to succeed, but I have a hard time seeing the parallel you mentioned. One example benefitted you personally, while the other is a good concept in theory. In your example of the early internet (too slow to load webpage, to streaming video), you described a direct benefit you experienced personally (you needed to access a piece of content and it got that to you fast) But when you use crypto, you said it's revolutionary because it "wrenches power from centralized authorities". That is not a direct benefit you experienced personally. That description is a high-level concept. So, it's hard for me to see the parallel.
- SkyMarshal 8y ago>It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the network, which was incredibly useful to academia and the military and was orders of magnitude more efficient than any alternative. I don't think the ICO's are being compared to the Internet itself, but to the many early attempts at building webapps on it that ultimately collapsed in the dot com crash. That's what most ICOs are.
- kgwgk 8y agoGoogling for - blockchain "like the internet was" - retrives thousands of links.
- darawk 8y ago> It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning That really depends on where you put 'beginning'. But more to the point, blockchains are useful now, just like the internet was. They're just not useful for all the things that are being promised (yet). Also, just like the internet wasn't. > Now, all we see is rampant fraud and a complete disregard for the environment [0] with no gain in efficiency. People never tire of pointing this out. Yet it completely ignores the fact that there are solutions to this problem that are in the works, and have been planned for a long time. There are lots of problems with the crypto space. Fraud is rampant. Energy consumption is wasteful, temporarily. It's also not clear that dis-intermediating human institutions is actually what we want to do. But if you think it's all a fraud, or that there is no value, then you're just not thinking very hard.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aboodman 8y ago> They're just not useful for all the things that are being promised (yet). Also, just like the internet wasn't. Exactly. The early internet was full of promises of taking over retail. None of that worked, at first. Instead the internet was useful for messaging and putting up personal websites. All the responsible people at the time kept whining -- how is it going to make money?? Well, people kept working on it. For years. Business cycles came and went. Eventually the promise worked out.
- pjc50 8y ago> The early internet was full of promises of taking over retail. None of that worked, at first. Timeframe? The early Internet was pretty non-commercial and the commercial services were generally proprietary and/or run by telecoms (Minitel, Prestel). There were a lot of failures in the 99/00 boom, but Amazon was founded in 1994. > how is it going to make money Ironically the question was more "how am I going to give you my credit card safely, given that cryptography is a technology subject to US export control".
- 8y ago
- dmix 8y agoThis is literally a (tongue-in-cheek) pyramid scheme right? https://dappradar.com/app/171/powh-3d https://dappradar.com/app/171/powh-3d
- deltateam 8y agoits funny how this article confirmed your existing worldview and all they did was look at how active twitter accounts were.
- shams93 8y agoWell most of the victims of "dot bomb" turned out to really not be that useful. It turns out Amazon does just fine delivering dog food. However there were enough useful services for the web to survive its near implosion in 2000-2001.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- phaser 8y agoOn dappradar DAUs are measured by transactions to the smart contracts, which probably means a user is acquiring or trading a token. While writing to the blockchain is costly, it's free to read and verify between users the ownership of assets. Users of DApp games know this, as putting two cryptocollectibles to fight against each other requires only a read operation that will not be reflected in ranking sites.
- babaeth 8y agodappradar offers a very limited view of the activity on the Ethereum Blockchain. You should look into projects like Golem, it shows a great use case for the Blockchain and definitely justify an ICO.