5 ms·

Maybe I'm just being cynical (or jealous!), but when I read "Vitalik Buterin, who has managed to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-w

by lavrov 8y ago

Maybe I'm just being cynical (or jealous!), but when I read "Vitalik Buterin, who has managed to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-world applications like Ethereum", I think it's worth asking what qualifies as successful, because to me, the inflated market cap of a speculative asset isn't an objective measure. I think that Ethereum's market cap has perhaps created an unearned reputation for solving an essential problem (running any verified, distributed computation) and being the best solution to large-scale verifiable computation, when I would argue that verifying a computation in a distributed system by having each node (or some large subset of nodes, if sharded) perform every step of every computation is not an optimal solution.

fullshark 8y ago
Money. A few engineers are impressed by the technology but most people are excited by the money and prospect of a lot more money in the future. That's what drives crypto fanatics instead of trying to generate value and that's why I think it will ultimately fail.
- thinkmassive 8y ago
  What's going to fail? Crypto fanatics? Cryptographically-secured trustless distributed systems? All of cryptography?
  - fullshark 8y ago
    The Ethereum ecosystem and its derivative coins will not gain adoption among anyone except a passionate sub cult which will eventually go to zero.
    - blocked_again 8y ago
      Similar statements were made about the computer and Internet as well.
      - simias 8y ago
        I hear this argument a lot, I'm not old enough to remember these times but I wonder how much is true. According to Wikipedia ARPANET was established in 1969, then: > In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, of BBN sent the first network e-mail (RFC 524, RFC 561).[59] By 1973, e-mail constituted 75 percent of ARPANET traffic. > By 1973, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification had been defined (RFC 354) and implemented, enabling file transfers over the ARPANET. This is what ARPANET looked like in 1974, or 5 years after its establishment: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Arpanet_1974.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Arpanet_... Meanwhile Bitcoin is almost 10 years old and all we have is speculation, scams, a near-useless currency and many promises. What we don't have is a useful application that showcases what only cryptocurrencies can do.
        sincerely 8y ago
        >What we don't have is a useful application that showcases what only cryptocurrencies can do. We do, and it's been running basically since shortly after bitcoin's creation: buying drugs. If mainstream cryptocurrency interest goes back to zero (which seems totally possible), people will still be using bitcoin/monero to buy drugs online.
        GenericsMotors 8y ago
        And for a comparison in the same tech era: Facebook had more than a billion users after 10 years. The "its still early days!" argument holds no water.
        whb07 8y ago
        Terrible comparison bro. One company is built on tech that’s been around for decades.
        GenericsMotors 8y ago
        Merkel trees have been around since the 70s.
    - ericb 8y ago
      I can't really understand this point of view. Digital scarcity is finally invented, but people feel like it will have no use-cases? Automated finance bots (smart contracts) that work without keeping a server up has no use-cases? All fiat currencies are deflated continuously, but you believe 100% of people will prefer this? The ability to embed money into a digital good has no value? How can it ever go to zero if there's someone out there who thinks it might be worth accumulating just for the remote chance that one of these ideas works out? The idea of it going to "zero" seems irrational to me.
      - root_axis 8y ago
        > Digital scarcity is finally invented, Totally untrue. Cryptocurrencies are artificially scarce, not actually scarce; this is most obvious when two chains hard-fork and the sum of their combined value exceeds the total value of the parent chain. You can't "fork" a scarce resource. Even without a fork, the scarcity is still an illusion because the consensus protocol can be modified to create an infinite number of tokens if that is the prerogative of the developers or community. > Automated finance bots (smart contracts) that work without keeping a server up has no use-cases Of course an automated finance bot needs a server, it's just a distributed and computationally expensive one instead of a centralized one that costs pennies to operate (and I say this as someone who has written profitable trading bots) > All fiat currencies are deflated continuously, but you believe 100% of people will prefer this The reason people prefer fiat money is because fiat money can be used buy goods and services and cryptocurrencies generally cannot without jumping through a bunch of hoops that offer no clear benefits in return. The OpSec that goes into "being your own bank" is not worth the cost to the overwhelming majority of people. > How can it ever go to zero I do agree that it is unlikely to ever go to zero simply because the limited utility cryptocurrencies do provide (irreversible pseudonymous online payments) will always have a niche use case that will keep the price above zero.
        ericb 8y ago
        > You can't "fork" a scarce resource. A fork gets you nothing on the original chain, just like inventing "new dollars" gets you nothing except what the market decides "new dollars" are worth. Digital scarcity is still there. If I have an item on that blockchain, you can't take it from me by forking. The only way to "move" that asset would be to get my private key. Forks are an anomaly the market is still figuring out. > Of course an automated finance bot needs a server, it's just a distributed and computationally expensive one instead of a centralized one that costs pennies to operate This misses the point. If I want to make a trading bot, I have to find a host, initiate a business relationship with them, and keep it running and highly available. If I make an ethereum smart contract, I set and forget. If I want people to interact with my bot and know it's source code, I can do that on ethereum. Is there another way you can think of to do this and have the bot be transparent--in other words a guarantee that the source code you looked at is actually the source code you're interacting with? > The OpSec that goes into "being your own bank" is not worth the cost to the overwhelming majority of people. This is only true until people notice the deflation. The ability to convert electricity to money that doesn't automatically shrink (even if it is not ready-cash) is very valuable in places where it is shrinking quickly.
    - twerpy_d 8y ago
      It has already gained adoption outside of that sub cult. All of the major financial institutions are researching applications of blockchains - many on top of private ethereum deployments. Ethereum is PROGRAMMABLE MONEY. It's a technology that's certainly here to stay, but that's not to say that ethereum itself will be the dominant platform.
      - cryptobeanbaby 8y ago
        >Ethereum is PROGRAMMABLE MONEY What if someone just programs more programmable money? Also why would anyone want to use a system where over 71% of all money is owned by a small group of anonymous oligarchs? Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH ) = 72,009,990 ETH Total Supply today (Jul 19th 2018) = 100,773,797 ETH Source: https://etherscan.io/stat/supply Not to mention, Ethereum and DAPPs can't validate any interesting external data without relying on centralized trusted data sources - at which point it becomes cheaper, more efficient, practical and legally accountable to just set up a normal database app.
        twerpy_d 8y ago
        Most financial applications or experiments in the space are not conducted on the public blockchain so the oligarch aspect of it is not applicable - and no someone can't just program more money on the public blockchain - the blockchain exists to validate the amount of money flowing through it. If someone "programs more" that's essentially a fork and they can't transact with it unless other folks in the network fork as well.
  - john_moscow 8y ago
    "Trustless" is a very tricky concept. Instead of trusting a centralized authority bound by laws and regulations, you trust an assumption that enough independent parties will continue spending significant amount of computation power on mining without merging or colluding to execute a 51% attack. It holds for now, but once the spirit of the 2017's hypergrowth fades away, things may start to look differently.
    - GenericsMotors 8y ago
      And proof of stake has its own problems, if the EOS project is anything to go by...
      - TTPrograms 8y ago
        EOS's issues are due to its convoluted governance structure, not POS.
        GenericsMotors 8y ago
        Not having one vote per person seems to be one of the main grievances. How will ethereum solve this aspect?
        TTPrograms 8y ago
        Voting has nothing to do with it, let alone votes per person. PoS doesn't require a voting system as EoS has implemented. The problem is having transaction inclusion decided by individuals that are voted in. It's analogous to having a democratic-republic government running a computer program.
        GenericsMotors 8y ago
        So still plagued by whales and cartels dominating the votes.
- dlwdlw 8y ago
  A similar sentiment drove the technocratic elite to a centralized economy in communist china. It may not be beautiful or ideal but it’s fairly effective at coordinating large amounts of people, especially if they are at odds somewhat.
DennisP 8y ago
Of course it's not optimal. But consensus mechanisms resilient to Byzantine attack are an active area of academic research, and traditionally they've all required all nodes to hold the complete state. Bitcoin's contribution was a new method that scaled to a much large number of nodes and didn't require a known set of nodes; the tradeoffs were low throughput, long latency, and offering only probabilistic finality. But it wasn't Vitalik who created that; what he did was extend it into an application platform. That platform is working, with live applications including decentralized exchanges, Maker (stable currency and collateralized loans) and Augur (prediction market with decentralized bet resolution). Sharding is one of the main things he and the research team are working on now (along with proof of stake). The current design uses 4000 shards, so unless you consider 1/4000 to be a large subset, it would answer your objection if they manage to get it working.
- lavrov 8y ago
  Verifiable computation is an active and developed area of research in cryptography, and the validation method of having every node run every step of every computation is the most naive approach. There are plenty of ways to prove to you that I faithfully executed a computation that don't rely on your also having performed the computation. I don't know how active the Maker userbase is, but Augur has 700 monthly active users. It seems like it would be possible to manipulate the validator set for a particular shard - also, isn't part of the point of ethereum to be able to access information from other contracts? How do you guarantee that that contract is on the same shard?
  - wycs 8y ago
    There is very active work on using STARKS for this purpose. In the long term this is the plan for both Tezos and Ethereum.
    - stopshadowbans 8y ago
      Too bad STARKS don’t work.
    - deleted 8y ago
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
I think Vitalik has being quite honest and realistic about it: "So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we earned it?" [0] [0]: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/940744724431982594?lang=en https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/940744724431982594...

by lavrov 8y ago

fullshark 8y ago

Money. A few engineers are impressed by the technology but most people are excited by the money and prospect of a lot more money in the future. That's what drives crypto fanatics instead of trying to generate value and that's why I think it will ultimately fail.

thinkmassive 8y ago
What's going to fail? Crypto fanatics? Cryptographically-secured trustless distributed systems? All of cryptography?
- fullshark 8y ago
  The Ethereum ecosystem and its derivative coins will not gain adoption among anyone except a passionate sub cult which will eventually go to zero.
  - blocked_again 8y ago
    Similar statements were made about the computer and Internet as well.
    - simias 8y ago
      I hear this argument a lot, I'm not old enough to remember these times but I wonder how much is true. According to Wikipedia ARPANET was established in 1969, then: > In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, of BBN sent the first network e-mail (RFC 524, RFC 561).[59] By 1973, e-mail constituted 75 percent of ARPANET traffic. > By 1973, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification had been defined (RFC 354) and implemented, enabling file transfers over the ARPANET. This is what ARPANET looked like in 1974, or 5 years after its establishment: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Arpanet_1974.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Arpanet_... Meanwhile Bitcoin is almost 10 years old and all we have is speculation, scams, a near-useless currency and many promises. What we don't have is a useful application that showcases what only cryptocurrencies can do.
      - sincerely 8y ago
        >What we don't have is a useful application that showcases what only cryptocurrencies can do. We do, and it's been running basically since shortly after bitcoin's creation: buying drugs. If mainstream cryptocurrency interest goes back to zero (which seems totally possible), people will still be using bitcoin/monero to buy drugs online.
      - GenericsMotors 8y ago
        And for a comparison in the same tech era: Facebook had more than a billion users after 10 years. The "its still early days!" argument holds no water.
        whb07 8y ago
        Terrible comparison bro. One company is built on tech that’s been around for decades.
        GenericsMotors 8y ago
        Merkel trees have been around since the 70s.
  - ericb 8y ago
    I can't really understand this point of view. Digital scarcity is finally invented, but people feel like it will have no use-cases? Automated finance bots (smart contracts) that work without keeping a server up has no use-cases? All fiat currencies are deflated continuously, but you believe 100% of people will prefer this? The ability to embed money into a digital good has no value? How can it ever go to zero if there's someone out there who thinks it might be worth accumulating just for the remote chance that one of these ideas works out? The idea of it going to "zero" seems irrational to me.
    - root_axis 8y ago
      > Digital scarcity is finally invented, Totally untrue. Cryptocurrencies are artificially scarce, not actually scarce; this is most obvious when two chains hard-fork and the sum of their combined value exceeds the total value of the parent chain. You can't "fork" a scarce resource. Even without a fork, the scarcity is still an illusion because the consensus protocol can be modified to create an infinite number of tokens if that is the prerogative of the developers or community. > Automated finance bots (smart contracts) that work without keeping a server up has no use-cases Of course an automated finance bot needs a server, it's just a distributed and computationally expensive one instead of a centralized one that costs pennies to operate (and I say this as someone who has written profitable trading bots) > All fiat currencies are deflated continuously, but you believe 100% of people will prefer this The reason people prefer fiat money is because fiat money can be used buy goods and services and cryptocurrencies generally cannot without jumping through a bunch of hoops that offer no clear benefits in return. The OpSec that goes into "being your own bank" is not worth the cost to the overwhelming majority of people. > How can it ever go to zero I do agree that it is unlikely to ever go to zero simply because the limited utility cryptocurrencies do provide (irreversible pseudonymous online payments) will always have a niche use case that will keep the price above zero.
      - ericb 8y ago
        > You can't "fork" a scarce resource. A fork gets you nothing on the original chain, just like inventing "new dollars" gets you nothing except what the market decides "new dollars" are worth. Digital scarcity is still there. If I have an item on that blockchain, you can't take it from me by forking. The only way to "move" that asset would be to get my private key. Forks are an anomaly the market is still figuring out. > Of course an automated finance bot needs a server, it's just a distributed and computationally expensive one instead of a centralized one that costs pennies to operate This misses the point. If I want to make a trading bot, I have to find a host, initiate a business relationship with them, and keep it running and highly available. If I make an ethereum smart contract, I set and forget. If I want people to interact with my bot and know it's source code, I can do that on ethereum. Is there another way you can think of to do this and have the bot be transparent--in other words a guarantee that the source code you looked at is actually the source code you're interacting with? > The OpSec that goes into "being your own bank" is not worth the cost to the overwhelming majority of people. This is only true until people notice the deflation. The ability to convert electricity to money that doesn't automatically shrink (even if it is not ready-cash) is very valuable in places where it is shrinking quickly.
  - twerpy_d 8y ago
    It has already gained adoption outside of that sub cult. All of the major financial institutions are researching applications of blockchains - many on top of private ethereum deployments. Ethereum is PROGRAMMABLE MONEY. It's a technology that's certainly here to stay, but that's not to say that ethereum itself will be the dominant platform.
    - cryptobeanbaby 8y ago
      >Ethereum is PROGRAMMABLE MONEY What if someone just programs more programmable money? Also why would anyone want to use a system where over 71% of all money is owned by a small group of anonymous oligarchs? Presale ICO / Premine ( max cost $0.50 USD per ETH ) = 72,009,990 ETH Total Supply today (Jul 19th 2018) = 100,773,797 ETH Source: https://etherscan.io/stat/supply Not to mention, Ethereum and DAPPs can't validate any interesting external data without relying on centralized trusted data sources - at which point it becomes cheaper, more efficient, practical and legally accountable to just set up a normal database app.
      - twerpy_d 8y ago
        Most financial applications or experiments in the space are not conducted on the public blockchain so the oligarch aspect of it is not applicable - and no someone can't just program more money on the public blockchain - the blockchain exists to validate the amount of money flowing through it. If someone "programs more" that's essentially a fork and they can't transact with it unless other folks in the network fork as well.
- john_moscow 8y ago
  "Trustless" is a very tricky concept. Instead of trusting a centralized authority bound by laws and regulations, you trust an assumption that enough independent parties will continue spending significant amount of computation power on mining without merging or colluding to execute a 51% attack. It holds for now, but once the spirit of the 2017's hypergrowth fades away, things may start to look differently.
  - GenericsMotors 8y ago
    And proof of stake has its own problems, if the EOS project is anything to go by...
    - TTPrograms 8y ago
      EOS's issues are due to its convoluted governance structure, not POS.
      - GenericsMotors 8y ago
        Not having one vote per person seems to be one of the main grievances. How will ethereum solve this aspect?
        TTPrograms 8y ago
        Voting has nothing to do with it, let alone votes per person. PoS doesn't require a voting system as EoS has implemented. The problem is having transaction inclusion decided by individuals that are voted in. It's analogous to having a democratic-republic government running a computer program.
        GenericsMotors 8y ago
        So still plagued by whales and cartels dominating the votes.
dlwdlw 8y ago
A similar sentiment drove the technocratic elite to a centralized economy in communist china. It may not be beautiful or ideal but it’s fairly effective at coordinating large amounts of people, especially if they are at odds somewhat.

DennisP 8y ago

Of course it's not optimal. But consensus mechanisms resilient to Byzantine attack are an active area of academic research, and traditionally they've all required all nodes to hold the complete state. Bitcoin's contribution was a new method that scaled to a much large number of nodes and didn't require a known set of nodes; the tradeoffs were low throughput, long latency, and offering only probabilistic finality. But it wasn't Vitalik who created that; what he did was extend it into an application platform. That platform is working, with live applications including decentralized exchanges, Maker (stable currency and collateralized loans) and Augur (prediction market with decentralized bet resolution). Sharding is one of the main things he and the research team are working on now (along with proof of stake). The current design uses 4000 shards, so unless you consider 1/4000 to be a large subset, it would answer your objection if they manage to get it working.

lavrov 8y ago
Verifiable computation is an active and developed area of research in cryptography, and the validation method of having every node run every step of every computation is the most naive approach. There are plenty of ways to prove to you that I faithfully executed a computation that don't rely on your also having performed the computation. I don't know how active the Maker userbase is, but Augur has 700 monthly active users. It seems like it would be possible to manipulate the validator set for a particular shard - also, isn't part of the point of ethereum to be able to access information from other contracts? How do you guarantee that that contract is on the same shard?
- wycs 8y ago
  There is very active work on using STARKS for this purpose. In the long term this is the plan for both Tezos and Ethereum.
  - stopshadowbans 8y ago
    Too bad STARKS don’t work.
  - deleted 8y ago

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

I think Vitalik has being quite honest and realistic about it: "So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we earned it?" [0] [0]: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/940744724431982594?lang=en https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/940744724431982594...