5 ms·

In a space absolutely filled with hucksters and scam artists, vitalik is legit. Good read.

snitko 7y ago
Vitalik and ETH are the definitions of scam and scammer. He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. And ETH is the same: it obfuscates its uselessness and nonsense by being overly complex, every year employing new terms and coming up with tons of code that only increases the attack surface and complicates things even more.
- jkhdigital 7y ago
  > tons of code that only increases the attack surface Ethereum itself was the original sin in this respect. In Bitcoin, for the most part, the economic value at stake in a block is (1) the block reward, (2) the transaction fees, and (3) the amount transacted. (1) + (2) + (3) is therefore the maximum amount that can theoretically be "moved" if a block is invalidated through an adversarial fork, since someone else can claim the miner rewards and every transaction could possibly be double-spent. Anyone who wants to be assured of transaction immutability can, at the very least, calculate the total value that is at stake and wait until at least this much PoW has been layered on top of the transaction. Not so with smart contracts. A paper I read yesterday showed how smart contracts can be used to execute trustless, crowd-sourced DoS attacks on rival blockchains (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/775.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/775.pdf). It's ridiculous. Once you open the Pandora's Box of smart contracts, you can throw your consensus guarantees out the window.
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    > smart contracts can be used to execute trustless, crowd-sourced DoS attacks on rival blockchains And that's a good thing. We needed an established way to attack rival blockchains that use the same PoW mechanism. They are insecure by design of PoW, and until they are all torn down by attacks, unsuspecting people can loose a lot of money.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack. It degrades discussion. Maybe you don't owe every person better, but you owe the community better if you're posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - maehwasu 7y ago
    Blanket rules like “no personal attacks” are easily exploited by intelligent, sociopathic individuals. Vitalik is one of the most talented of those types, and he needs to be called out before he takes more money from easily-duped fanboys.
  - Huycfhct 7y ago
    I would happily sacrifice my account if it makes 1 person aware that Vitalik is a complete fraud
- nootropicat 7y ago
  >He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. What? Nothing could be more unfair. His articles on zk-snarks and starks are probably the most approachable explanations available. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-programs-from-zero-to-hero-f6d558cea649 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-prog... https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html
- x3sphere 7y ago
  I don't agree, but anyway, how does that even make him a scammer? Vitalik rarely talks about the price of ETH, and he's very open about the risks and shortcomings. During the 2016-2017 bubble he was even tweeting that the crypto space had done very little to even deserve the runup. However you had several other prominent people tweeting things that only amplified the bubble, so it did little to tame things, but at least he wasn't participating in it. If he's a scammer, as you put it, he's doing a very poor job of that.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Except let's not forget the DAO hack, where everything was forked because too many rich people lost their money.
- drcode 7y ago
  If by "everything" you mean "the balance in one address was moved to one other address" then that would be a correct statement.
  - jki275 7y ago
    No, they forked the whole thing, and essentially destroyed the concept that cryptocurrency ledgers were immutable.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - drcode 7y ago
      By installing the fork you agreed to the statement "everything is exactly as before except the balances of two addresses"
      - commandersaki 7y ago
        http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog.html http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscri...
      - jki275 7y ago
        And of course the fact that the fork is no longer immutable as it’s controlled by people who don’t believe in the core tenet of cryptocurrency.
- commandersaki 7y ago
  http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog.html http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscri...
BLanen 7y ago
This is the guy that thought you could do Shor's algorithm by emulating a quantum computer and having it be faster than a classical solution.
- heinrichf 7y ago
  Hm, sounds worrying, do you have a source for that?
  - solveit 7y ago
    Buterin was briefly involved with people trying to efficiently simulate quantum computers (https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1062156966452228096 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/106215696645222809...). I don't know much about the details of this particular attempt , but the strategy is not ridiculous on its face. Very implausible, yes, but it contradicts no theorem nor any established law of physics. Mostly, it's implausible because many people have tried very hard to find efficient classical simulations of quantum computers and all have failed.
  - haakon 7y ago
    Not sure how reliable you might consider this source, but here's some information: https://medium.com/@tradertimm/vitaliks-quantum-conundrum-34b4a6b30a28 https://medium.com/@tradertimm/vitaliks-quantum-conundrum-34...
  - DennisP 7y ago
    From what I've seen, it's true, but Ethereum launched when Vitalik was 19 and his quantum silliness was years before that. Personally I'm glad nobody's looking at the stupid things I was thinking about at that age.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sincerely 7y ago
  Wasn't he literally in high school at the time?

Vitalik and ETH are the definitions of scam and scammer. He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. And ETH is the same: it obfuscates its uselessness and nonsense by being overly complex, every year employing new terms and coming up with tons of code that only increases the attack surface and complicates things even more.

jkhdigital 7y ago
> tons of code that only increases the attack surface Ethereum itself was the original sin in this respect. In Bitcoin, for the most part, the economic value at stake in a block is (1) the block reward, (2) the transaction fees, and (3) the amount transacted. (1) + (2) + (3) is therefore the maximum amount that can theoretically be "moved" if a block is invalidated through an adversarial fork, since someone else can claim the miner rewards and every transaction could possibly be double-spent. Anyone who wants to be assured of transaction immutability can, at the very least, calculate the total value that is at stake and wait until at least this much PoW has been layered on top of the transaction. Not so with smart contracts. A paper I read yesterday showed how smart contracts can be used to execute trustless, crowd-sourced DoS attacks on rival blockchains (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/775.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/775.pdf). It's ridiculous. Once you open the Pandora's Box of smart contracts, you can throw your consensus guarantees out the window.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  > smart contracts can be used to execute trustless, crowd-sourced DoS attacks on rival blockchains And that's a good thing. We needed an established way to attack rival blockchains that use the same PoW mechanism. They are insecure by design of PoW, and until they are all torn down by attacks, unsuspecting people can loose a lot of money.
dang 7y ago
Please don't cross into personal attack. It degrades discussion. Maybe you don't owe every person better, but you owe the community better if you're posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- maehwasu 7y ago
  Blanket rules like “no personal attacks” are easily exploited by intelligent, sociopathic individuals. Vitalik is one of the most talented of those types, and he needs to be called out before he takes more money from easily-duped fanboys.
- Huycfhct 7y ago
  I would happily sacrifice my account if it makes 1 person aware that Vitalik is a complete fraud
nootropicat 7y ago
>He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. What? Nothing could be more unfair. His articles on zk-snarks and starks are probably the most approachable explanations available. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-programs-from-zero-to-hero-f6d558cea649 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-prog... https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html
x3sphere 7y ago
I don't agree, but anyway, how does that even make him a scammer? Vitalik rarely talks about the price of ETH, and he's very open about the risks and shortcomings. During the 2016-2017 bubble he was even tweeting that the crypto space had done very little to even deserve the runup. However you had several other prominent people tweeting things that only amplified the bubble, so it did little to tame things, but at least he wasn't participating in it. If he's a scammer, as you put it, he's doing a very poor job of that.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

Except let's not forget the DAO hack, where everything was forked because too many rich people lost their money.

drcode 7y ago
If by "everything" you mean "the balance in one address was moved to one other address" then that would be a correct statement.
- jki275 7y ago
  No, they forked the whole thing, and essentially destroyed the concept that cryptocurrency ledgers were immutable.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - drcode 7y ago
    By installing the fork you agreed to the statement "everything is exactly as before except the balances of two addresses"
    - commandersaki 7y ago
      http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog.html http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscri...
    - jki275 7y ago
      And of course the fact that the fork is no longer immutable as it’s controlled by people who don’t believe in the core tenet of cryptocurrency.
commandersaki 7y ago
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog/2017-12-06-manuscript-of-llangammontyrchrugog.html http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2017-12-06-manuscri...

BLanen 7y ago

This is the guy that thought you could do Shor's algorithm by emulating a quantum computer and having it be faster than a classical solution.

heinrichf 7y ago
Hm, sounds worrying, do you have a source for that?
- solveit 7y ago
  Buterin was briefly involved with people trying to efficiently simulate quantum computers (https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1062156966452228096 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/106215696645222809...). I don't know much about the details of this particular attempt , but the strategy is not ridiculous on its face. Very implausible, yes, but it contradicts no theorem nor any established law of physics. Mostly, it's implausible because many people have tried very hard to find efficient classical simulations of quantum computers and all have failed.
- haakon 7y ago
  Not sure how reliable you might consider this source, but here's some information: https://medium.com/@tradertimm/vitaliks-quantum-conundrum-34b4a6b30a28 https://medium.com/@tradertimm/vitaliks-quantum-conundrum-34...
- DennisP 7y ago
  From what I've seen, it's true, but Ethereum launched when Vitalik was 19 and his quantum silliness was years before that. Personally I'm glad nobody's looking at the stupid things I was thinking about at that age.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sincerely 7y ago
Wasn't he literally in high school at the time?