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Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore

• heterodoxxed 6y ago
  | "What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. I don't see any evidence of this being true.
  • realPubkey 6y ago
    I also see no evidence, but many hints. Most people use ethereum to send eth or ERC20 tokens. There are not many who use the smart contracts for anything else.
  • drom5 6y ago
    I would say that the killer app currently is decentralised finance, lending and trading for example on the chain. The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain.
    • cnasc 6y ago
      > The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain. NFTs aren’t exclusively art. For example, I previously worked at https://unlock-protocol.com/ https://unlock-protocol.com/ which uses NFTs to signify membership
    • dbspin 6y ago
      Hypothetically, NFTs are amazing. They have the potential to revolutionise royalties and help artist directly profit from the success of their work. There are successful marketplaces like Nifty Gateway for visual NFT's and some under development for music NFTs. But... Right now, Etheriums soaring 'gas' prices are basically freezing new entrants into the market. The cost of 'minting' a token on the blockchain right now - say an image or animation on rarible.com, is enormous. Worse, the gas cost of purchasing an NFT can be triple the sale price. It's the equivalent of a varying, unpredictable rate of VAT in the hundreds of percent. This is having a knock on effect on all the NFT markets. Maybe it can be solved by Etherium 2.0, but right now Ether isn't fit for purpose for NFTs. Tying the cost of smart contract 'gas' to the value of the digital currency made this inevitable.
      • suikadayo 6y ago
        We don’t have to wait for Eth2, there are several L2 solutions in the works right now like Optimism and Polygon
        • dbspin 6y ago
          They're not supported on any of the popular NFT trading / minting sites. That economy is currently built around ETH.
          • suikadayo 6y ago
            Opensea currently uses Matic/Polygon, in addition to L1 https://matic.opensea.io/ https://matic.opensea.io/
      • peter_l_downs 6y ago
        Couldn't agree more that NFTs are theoretically very interesting but the way they work right now is absolute garbage. See this experience report: https://freezine.xyz/4/nfts/index.html https://freezine.xyz/4/nfts/index.html
        • dbspin 6y ago
          I don't think this is particularly an issue with the way NFTs work - except in regard to their choice of Ether, and Ether's current issue with gas prices. I think there's a lot of potential in the existing markets. It's really specifically a problem with the economics of trading them, caused by the inflation in transaction costs of Ether. Article you linked the artists issue is that he couldn't find a market for his art. Which kind of misses the point. "Then I asked around if anyone wanted to buy it. The boys in the groupchat weren't interested. Neither were any of my twitter followers. Damn." Sure you could get lucky with being early into a highly speculative market, but by and large this is like patreon or kickstarter or anything else online. If there's a potential market for what you're making or doing, it's a new (and potentially lucrative) way to tap into it. It doesn't generate a new demand for work that doesn't have (or can't generate) an audience on its own. NFTs aren't a form of advertising, certainly not a particularly effective one. Also the artist initially used Zora (which I've never heard of), rather than Rarible or Opensea, or Mintable or Snark or any of the better known open markets. On rarible he set his royalties to 25% (rather than the usual 10%) which obviously discourages speculative investment. He also set the cost of his first art piece to 1 ETH! Crazy high for an unknown artist. The article kind of seems like a snarky joke, but if it is one I'm not sure what the punchline is, given he really did spend the money and really does seem to want to sell the NFTs. I think it's more likely a case of irony employed as a defence mechanism. We have someone who self confesses he doesn't understand the market, making a remix piece quickly and half assedly, selling it at a high rate across multiple markets, without an audience or any interest in what is popular there. I mean I get it, who wants to miss the gold rush? But it's not a useful barometer of NFTs. Currently all the real money is being made by selective services who primarily work with digital artists who have an existing following, or make work they think will reach an audience - sites like niftygateway.com or superrare.co The work that's selling well is generally excellent. And sure, there is something inherently ridiculous in the idea of 'owning' a piece of digital art. But no more so that owning a numbered print or piece of video art by a renowned artist, or hell a cardigan owned by Kurt Cobain. All of which have real, established and ongoing value.
    • antupis 6y ago
      I would say NFT and micropayments are killer apps. It would be fantastic if we had browser addon where you can 1-click pay something like 0.01$ to read article. NFT for gaming is going to be huge industry eg pro-gamers could sell their character skins same way now eg basketball players sell their jerseys or you could import that Hearthstone deck to complete new game.
      • heterodoxxed 6y ago
        | 1-click pay something like 0.01$ to read article. How would this work in a way that takes gas/fees into consideration?
        • Clewza313 6y ago
          That's kind of the point: it's completely infeasible to do microtransactions with Ethereum, much less Bitcoin. At time of writing it costs around $23 (!) to do a single ETH transaction.
          • aabbcc1241 6y ago
            We can if the network is not full of professional miners. If every user has a practical chance to pack their transaction into a block.
          • _alex_ 6y ago
            There are several lightning network (payment channel layer on top of bitcoin) paywalls where you can pay 1/10 of a cent to read an article. The tech exists, its now an adoption problem
          • suikadayo 6y ago
            It’ll be possible with L2 like Optimism which will be out for the public next month.
        • somebodythere 6y ago
          Do it in a state channel or rollup.
    • gruez 6y ago
      >The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain. There's this story from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26196027 I'm not sure whether it's a good sign or a bad sign. On one hand it shows NFTs being serious because there's a huge ($500+k) transaction behind it. On the other hand it shows how frothy the market is given how someone just dropped $500k for a few hundred bits.
    • jobigoud 6y ago
      > The second killer app is NFTs, basically the exchange of art on the chain Art is probably the worst use-case for NFT. NFT work well for memberships, tickets, virtual land in games, etc. For art, not so much. It doesn't solve ownership: any one else can "own" the same piece of art, it's only the NFT that is unique. It doesn't solve scarcity: the author can make more copies and wrap them into other NFTs. It doesn't solve authenticity: any one can wrap existing art into an NFT and sell it. Basically the only thing NFT art solve is anteriority and possibly authorship: you can prove that you made a piece of art before a certain date, and that you published it first.
  • ccortes 6y ago
    It's not. Maybe if somehow egass fees go down, right now they are so high that even bitcoin is a better alternative. I think the author is equating ethereum with stable coins?
  • pjc50 6y ago
    > world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. Isn't that SEPA? Or Paypal?
    • tmarice 6y ago
      It is, unless you're deemed untouchable.
      • aww_dang 6y ago
        There's also the KYC aspects of crypto exchanges.
  • nstj 6y ago
    Are you familiar with the “DeFi revolution?”
    • TeeWEE 6y ago
      DeFI is yet another set of inflated expectations and bullish sentiment to attract even more investors. In real terms its not doing a lot yet.
      • nstj 6y ago
        For sure, I never said it was actually implemented/feasible. Just that it’s the current vector by which Ethereum is being marketed
  • microtherion 6y ago
    I'm not a huge fan of lawyers and bankers, but I'd take my chances with them any day over this kind of platform: https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ecc5f0505dff https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ec...
• KDJohnBrown 6y ago
  Why would someone expect cryptocurrencies to be fun? It’s fintech. Money isn’t fun, it’s money.
  • Darmody 6y ago
    There's more than money. Some coins like Ethereum have a network behind them on top of which you can do a lot of stuff.
    • ben_bai 6y ago
      Like sia (siacoin) which is used to pay for distributed storage. But still needs mining to keep going, which distracts from it's purpose. Rent and lend storage space. I which there where some other distributed consensus mechanism which doesn't rely on massive mining.
      • erikbye 6y ago
        Lots of uses other than pure fin transactions. Most people are blind to this. E.g. https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/
  • phire 6y ago
    A lot of bitcoin/cryptocurrency early adopters were there because it's fun. Especially in 2009 and 2010 before bitcoin proved it could have value, but even up to about 2016, a lot of people still seemed to be attracted due to the fun. And a lot of those people ended up in leadership positions.
• ccortes 6y ago
  If all you want is smart contracts then why stick to ethereum? As you stated there are plenty of different projects wich are far more scalable.
  • You-Are-Right 6y ago
    Please name five of many.
• 3np 6y ago
  I think many developers getting sucked into a new exciting technology feel similarly at some point once it gets enough traction. "I know; it's such a hipster statement." might be all there is to it, and that's fine. I had the same phases with web and ML and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a bit of a hipster in that sense. I think your feelings are perfectly valid and you should listen to yourself, but also realize that you'd do best in not generalizing it to be anything but personal. ...And from someone who was deep into Ethereum tech starting 2014-2015, I recently got surprisingly really hooked again on Bitcoin. Lightning is fun and addictive, and it feels like we're close to some kind of watershed there. Hopefully you'll find something new to be excited about soon (or take a break from it all, sometimes that's what we need as well). --- The reason I'm fed up with Ethereum right now is mostly the "defi" hype where it's mostly anything but decentralized in any way if you look just a bit closer. This goes for pretty much all the projects with significant traction today. So many corners are cut just to be able to ride the wave of the hype train. "The admin with full control is only until we are out of beta, for safety", "The centralized coordinator on AWS will be replaced with a gossip protocol by V2", "The owner multisig will be replaced by a DAO", "the project leads will do all the coordination for now" and other BS rationalizations all completely antithetical to the ideology. One major strength of Ethereum for many years have been the community. Recently I feel like greed has taken over.
  • timdaub 6y ago
    Thanks for that comment :)
  • tinco 6y ago
    Vitalik is always bitching about the greedy community, but that's really not what is killing Ethereum. What is killing Ethereum is its glacial development pace. It took so many years for Ethereum 2 to be deployed, and even now it's deployed it's a weak shell of what it should have been. An argument against that could be that it's simply a hard problem to solve, but then the question becomes if they've solved any other easier problems, and it seems to me like they haven't. This is their page on smart contracts, arguably the only justification for Ethereum's existance: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/languages/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/lang... It not only still mentions Solidity, a language which is one of the worst mistakes in IT history, it lists it as the first choice in a set of 2 options, of which the latter is only marginally superior to it. This was acceptable in 2017, a year after the realization of how huge a fuckup Solidity is, since a year might be a short time for a language to be developed and matured enough, but it's now 2021, 5 years later! It makes me feel Ethereum just isn't managed adequately, despite being a multi-billion dollar operation.
• qznc 6y ago
  Vitalik recently blogged [0] that prediction markets might be there most important thing in Ethereum. > it is one of the Ethereum applications that have provided to me the most concrete value. [0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html
  • londons_explore 6y ago
    Not everyone has a million dollars lying around to earn a 5% return, if your bet is correct...
  • joosters 6y ago
    That's a short-sighted, american-centric view. In the rest of the world, prediction markets (e.g. Betfair) have existed for decades. It's not a technology that needs decentralisation or its own currency, so why on earth is it expected to be a killer app for crypto?
• bhaak 6y ago
  > Where there was a feeling of revolution and new beginnings, now there are people in suits talking corporate. I read both "Digital Gold" by Nathaniel Popper about the early days of Bitcoin and "The Infinite Machine" by Camila Russo about the inception of Ethereum and the difference between the early sentiment in those two projects is striking. Bitcoin came from a cypherpunk background and was very anti establishment whereas Ethereum seems to have been setup and conducted like a startup company. There was much more money involved starting the latter project. I can relate to the sentiment of the author though, money sucks the fun out of many things. But finance is at the heart of both projects, so it's too be expected that they get more professional and more business-like while they grow.
  • te_chris 6y ago
    Both of ETH and BTC's points these days is speculative gambling by people who care enough about finance to understand that, so people being shocked that finance people are invovled in something that it's possible to gamble on is a bit rich. It certainly isn't useful as "the world computer" or whatever: have you seen gwei lately??
• tamrix 6y ago
  Tech Heads believe that the better technically performing coin will surface as the best performer in ROI. Unfortunately the majority of people investing just want to make a buck more than they care about the tech involved. That's when you realise this has more to do with money, than tech.
• throw8932894 6y ago
  > I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless. > Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need for hardcore unproven technologies. So instead of fixing the actual problem, Ethereum scalability, we will do what? This technology was developed by a few guys, most of them already left. It was meant to fix Bitcoin "smart contracts" (there is a such thing). Tech behind Ethereum is outdated. Even newer versions rehash the same broken idea with sharding. We got 10 years and billions poured into consensus research. There are actual papers and universities doing this stuff. There are github projects that do stuff like decentralized auctions, mixers...
  • timdaub 6y ago
    Hey, I think you're making a valid point and I probably should have explained more what I meant by my statement. IMO, there's a middle ground we can go between slow PoW on L1 and scaleability. I think that it can be done by having tools that give us the same guarantees like deploying a smart contract on the main chain. It's difficult to explain: But what I want is Plasma but as a framework to develop dapps. This project is going that route: https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable https://github.com/hoytech/quadrable
    • VentureCurious 6y ago
      If you want a Layer2 plasma with similar guarantees to Ethereum (account based, not zero knowledge) then you may like Gluon.network once they roll out EVM support.
    • martindale 6y ago
      We're building this, but on Bitcoin ("Plasma but as a framework for dapps" [with a focus on developer experience]) [0]. There's already robust infrastructure for L2 contracts in Bitcoin-land, and we've already heavily optimized the L1 to prepare for the load that a global, ubiquitous solution would need. Honestly, I see no use for Ethereum (or other Turing Complete L1s) looking forward — smart contracts can be purely peer-to-peer, with the only pressure applied to L1 being dispute resolution. By pushing complex contracts up into Layer 2, we can keep the dangerous, money-destroying, theft-enabling Turing machines away from the main chain. [0]: https://fabric.pub https://fabric.pub
• vmception 6y ago
  yeah I'm having a blast you can pre-purchase gas when gas prices are low and use it when gas prices are high like now there are a lot of currently advanced ways to use Ethereum, and all EVMs The EVM is the thing to learn, being aware of the decentralization ideology is a nice to have and really irrelevant (which is hilarious argument to have with Ethereum bulls regarding other less secured EVMs because the bitcoiners and no-coiners and general Ethereum detractors don't even consider Ethereum decentralized)
  • inter_netuser 6y ago
    why is the decentralization irrelevant?
    • vmception 6y ago
      Because using an EVM in production is acknowledging what the market can bear and that market is worth trillions Like any public equity there can be centralized services worth more a lot, as they’re just platforms Being aware of what Ethereum mainnet does is okay but shouldn’t guide any of your decisions of whether you want to build on or be bullish on Binance Smart Chain or somebody’s deployment of any other EVM
      • inter_netuser 6y ago
        are you of the opinion that BSC might be a better choice than eth2?
• iagovar 6y ago
  Wasn't cardano supposed to fix this?
  • dylkil 6y ago
    yes, its been 4 years now and cardano doesnt even have smart contracting capabilities yet
    • sirpilade 6y ago
      I think they're making good, solid progress. They should be rolling smart contracts with Gougen in Q2 this year, and indications so far are that they should be on time
    • float4 6y ago
      Goguen, which is phase 3 of the roadmap and gives smart contracts, is expected to be released in March 2021. But sure, it's all taking very long.
      • skinnyasianboi 6y ago
        Native tokens(also part of Goguen) will be released on 1st of March but smart contracts in Q2
    • regisg 6y ago
      4 years of research & dev. All has come / is coming : - rich metadatas in transactions (done) - token locking (done) - native tokens almost on par with ADA ( on mainnet 05/03/2021 ) - Plutus & Marlowe ( smart contracts ). Testnet in March, mainnet early to late Q2, depending on testnet quality.
    • skinnyasianboi 6y ago
      4 years of doing it right and academically proven
      • juskrey 6y ago
• oilbagz 6y ago
  Its the stack. I can't get interested in any crypto currency or related technology that doesn't provide, at a minimum, a linkable C library or .. even better .. a luarocks module .. to do all the work. If I even have to think about using npm or javascript to join the new hipster cult, I'm out. These tools are not up to snuff. C'mon crypto guys, give us systems programmers the libs we need. Javascript is OUT. Your fancy DSL is OUT. Go C/C++ native, or GTFO ...
  • samtheprogram 6y ago
    Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting back into it. It’s getting mature, too. As someone who 5 years ago refused to learn JavaScript and was firmly in your camp, I don’t really see an “up to snuff” argument to be made anymore. All languages have quirks and JavaScript definitely has them, but it’s not alone in that regard, especially comparing to C/C++/Go. Besides, you don’t want a systems programming language to write code that runs in the EVM, or when running others untrusted code. Use the right tool for the right job.
    • TeeWEE 6y ago
      > Entire industries have been built on top of JavaScript, from rags to the most valuable companies in the world reinvesting back into it. It’s getting mature, too. This is a fallacy argument. Because other users it, doens't mean its good.
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      • samtheprogram 6y ago
        Thanks for pointing this out. While I think that speaks to the productivity it has provided (I guess that’s a stretch / could be coincidence), what I really should have conveyed is that through a thriving ecosystem and updated standards, it’s gotten a lot better over time. Node v8+ and latest versions of NPM are very far from where they used to be. Again, JavaScript is not without it’s quirks, but I don’t think any language is free from that statement, and JavaScript’s are easily managed in my opinion. It’s single threaded, but again, right tool for the right job.
• rock_artist 6y ago
  A little OT but seems the right place to ask. Is there any 'mainstream' crypto useful for micro-transactions with low-latency and low-transaction fees? Or mainstream is what kills actually kills it?
  • dylkil 6y ago
    Yes, but you sacrifice security for scalability. One of the ethereum layer 2's seem to be the most promising but are yet to gain major traction. Loopring seems to be in a pretty good place right now though. You could also use some other crypto like BCH, which vitalik once suggested could be used to store ethereum state. So if its good enough for him, it might be good enough for you.
  • ssijak 6y ago
    Nano. High throughoutput, no transaction fees. Works well for years already.
    • mlqnw 6y ago
      Having some level of transaction fees could be important for preventing DOS attacks. I also like the idea of forming a treasury from a cut of the transaction fees to fund proposals for future projects from within the community as Cardano and Polkadot have done.
      • rekshaw 6y ago
        > Having some level of transaction fees could be important for preventing DOS attacks. Agreed. Their mitigation approach is somewhat interesting as well though (dynamic PoW [1]). Thanks to the independent nature of the blocks, signing difficulty of the transactions can be raised and lowered dynamically making spam incrementally more expensive for the spammers. [1] https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-prioritization-4618b78c5be9 https://medium.com/nanocurrency/dynamic-proof-of-work-priori...
    • hutzlibu 6y ago
      Can you explain in simple words, how they achieve this?
• jeromenerf 6y ago
  The solidity language was never fun to me. I abandoned experiments before vyper and yul, the alternatives I know about, were out. Everything felt at the same time fragile and definitive. Bad things would happen if you “deployed” a flawed contract without the ever growing best practices of layers and proxies. I have had more fun learning about finance and creating indices than I have ever had coding on ethereum.
  • oilbagz 6y ago
    Totally. None of this felt safe, or sane, ever.
  • yulaow 6y ago
    Agree. Sadly both solidity and all the tools around it feel like a pile of broken things over other broken things over a lot of things who where brought up in a few days and forgotten in the todo world, and no one has the time or the will to fix them. The ethereum foundation should focus far far far more in tools implementation
• monkeydust 6y ago
  When do people expect Ethereum gas prices to come down? Right now if I want to move 1ETH its costing me $109 from one exchange.
  • ForHackernews 6y ago
    Right after the Tether/Bitcoin bubble pops.
    • charcircuit 6y ago
      Tether bubble? As in crashing from $1.002 to $1? USDT can always just be cashed out for regular money.
      • microtherion 6y ago
        For values of "always" that depend on whether Tether actually has $34B in reserves to back the 34B USDT currently in circulation. Call me crazy, but I'd bet on the "under" here.
        • monkeydust 6y ago
          Doesn't Tether have to provide 3rd party audited accounts as to what they actually hold in reserve?
          • ForHackernews 6y ago
            No. They have occasionally claimed to be independently audited, but never provided proof.
  • WJW 6y ago
    Supply and demand affecting gas prices is considered a feature, so it seems quite possible gas prices will only go higher if ETH becomes even more popular.
  • suikadayo 6y ago
• skinnyasianboi 6y ago
  > Instead, we need an approach for the average Joe developer to create their idea within the Ethereum ecosystem without the need for hardcore unproven technologies. Are you familiar with "The Island, The Ocean and the Pond" presentation by Charles Hoskinson?
• ilaksh 6y ago
  Well.. Ethereum isn't very trendy anymore, that's true. But I still think it has tons of promise and they are making a lot of progress on 2.0. I feel like its amazing some people are thinking of giving up on it before 2.0 gets launched. I did actually buy some DOT on Kraken today though. Because that also looks like an amazing project. And in the end, everything is basically a popularity contest. So regardless of technicals, momentum, or anything else, Ethereum could actually become completely uncool in X months or years. And PolkaDOT or something no one knows about could be what everyone uses. Maybe after WWIII its the digitual yuan for a few years.. but then the superintelligent robots take over a few years later and everyone has to use metashekels or whatever that human brains can't even comprehend. libp2p looks really useful by the way.
• squaredpants 6y ago
  Well, for the gas fees and scalability issues there's always avalanche [1] ... I feel like there's a project that already solves most of ethereum problems now, but it's been slept on for a while. [1] https://www.avalabs.org/ https://www.avalabs.org/
• yulaow 6y ago
  As a dapp dev for work, I totally feel the mental fatigue of constantly fighting the ever changing tool, the broken libraries, the inconsistent errors management and the cascade of breaking changes any modify causes. It feels like js frontend framework madness x 10
• questionmania 6y ago
  Check Cosmos(Tendermint).
• Traubenfuchs 6y ago
  Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped through and wrapped in mysticism. Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerds seeing the high trade volume then go and call this a success of crypto. lol
  • Synaesthesia 6y ago
    Great way to put it. Yes I got excited for crypto when it came out but long ago realised there's nothing emancipatory about it.
    • Taek 6y ago
      You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride. The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but didn't suffocate it, just merely put it way in the background.
      • DominikD 6y ago
        You're missing the point, which was "there's nothing for the masses". Interesting technology is not a selling point for the masses. Strong fundamentals are not a selling point for the masses. Whether there's a get rich quick crowd around crypto (or not) is not a selling point for the masses.
        • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
          The haber process feeds 4 billion people, and most don't know it exists. Not everything needs to be sold and popularised to the masses.
          • DominikD 6y ago
• fredgrott 6y ago
  The underlying problem with bitcoin is the same one with P2P and it's still has not been solved. IE, scalability of a decentralized network. Internet went the other way with a live-able scaling solution based on mixing non decentralized with decentralized. My prediction is that it will go the way of internet in that a set of orgs that are transparent will form the centralized structure to scale it at live-able terms and scaling. Does that mean pure P2P is not a scalable solve-able solution? It's a 5 systems level problem which means it takes more time, money, and sacrifice than people think to reach a discoverable solution. IMHO
  • itsdsmurrell 6y ago
    Try Bitcoin Cash. It's the one that implemented Satoshi's suggested upping of the block size limit, has the same block history as BTC up until the fork, and solves moving value at low fees. This operation is the one people should care about the most. Fancier things will take time. The community hangs out at r/btc by historical accident.
• TargetedVictim 6y ago
  Dutch police and mainstream media is trying to kill me over bitcoin and ethereum, for over 3 years now. https://pastebin.com/btAfNf3T https://pastebin.com/btAfNf3T
• maeln 6y ago
  I really, really don't understand where cryptocurrencies are going. Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no actual return technologically wise. And I understand, because interest are not aligned. It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups... Cryptocurrencies had a goal and a usefulness when they were at least used to buy drugs online and send a few bucks to your friends. Now you cannot even use them for that. Everybody saw the rise of the bitcoin valuation and since then, all that matter is how much you can make by trading crypto. The actual usefulness of the crypto, what it can do, is utterly irrelevant. This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature. Most btc trade are not even going through the bitcoin network but through third party, so btc even fail at its own goal. And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it, and you would be a fool to do so, since tomorrow, your 1 shitcoin might be worth 3 times what you brought it for. And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto... Then, to make matter even worse, the crypto community is its own worst enemy. Since it has been proven that, to make a few buck, all it takes is "creating" your own crypto and mining the first few block before other get in on it, you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto. Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ? We are more than 5 years into this crypto mania with an ungodly amount of money being thrown at it and there has been no significant technological progress, no crypto that is useful enough to be used by anybody else but crypto-fanatic trying to pump and dump it, and this is now becoming one of the worse climate disaster in a while. And all the while, every people invested in crypto will just talk about price, valuation, investment, hodling, etc. It is clear what is their real purpose. If you want to see actual progress in distributed computing, look for scientific paper coming from universities.
  • rawbot 6y ago
    IIRC Dogecoin was born as a meme. And now I'm supposed to believe it is a serious investment or cryptocurrency?
• khongbietgi 6y ago
  How about https://www.algorand.com/ https://www.algorand.com/ The team is promising and also their sdk is quite good.
  • exdsq 6y ago
    I like the Algorand team -- first blockchain project where I used an app I wanted to use and only afterwards realised it was using their blockchain.
    • khongbietgi 6y ago
      That's great. Do you mind sharing the name of that project?
      • exdsq 6y ago
        They store the data of FIDE Online chess matches, so the officially ranked games that you can play for online titles. Not sure why they chose a blockchain - perhaps they're actually used for identity too, so there's some p2p elements of arranging matches, but as I said I didn't even know they were involved until I saw an advert one day mentioning it.
        • khongbietgi 6y ago
          ah i see, they do have some small write up here as well https://worldchess.com/algorand/ https://worldchess.com/algorand/
  • Zambyte 6y ago
    Very glad to see Algorand in this thread. People need to talk about it more. It doesn't have most of the problems people have with crypto, and unlike cardano, it's here today and it works.
  • olah_1 6y ago
    I know that they use the same Clarity[1] smart contract language as Stacks. I like that it's not turing complete. The more I've read about Stacks, the more I like it. But I haven't done a deep dive into Algorand. Do you know offhand how they differ / what they're going for? [1]: https://clarity-lang.org/ https://clarity-lang.org/
• jasonrodrigues 6y ago
  @timdaub - try Celo (celo.org). Full EVM compatibility, low gas prices, mobile-first money legos. There's your hero.
  • mariD 6y ago
    can recommend!
• akyu 6y ago
  Ethereum was a very respectable proof of concept, but it's time is past. It gave a glimpse of a future that is really incredible for those of us who had time to poke around before fees got out of control. Sadly, Eth 2.0 does not look to be the messiah many seem to be preaching about. Sharding is a very questionable design decision. My take away from dabbling in Ethereum land is that Ethereans, and crypto folks in general, got their values mixed up. They hold decentralization to the highest standard above all else. But upon close inspection, virtually nothing in the Ethereum ecosystem actually lives up to the standard of decentralization. The kinds of decentralization you see are very superficial and largely seem to be intended to dodge regulation above all else (which I have no problem with, but we need to be honest with ourselves). After using the tech, you realize that whats really valuable about these systems is open APIs for value exchange, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance. The decentralization is not a value add. It is a hedge against counter-party risk. And that is important, especially as we go head first into an increasingly dystopic looking global financial system. But teasing apart these different aspects gives you a much better idea of what to focus on if you want to build the next generation of blockchain technology.
• labrador 6y ago
  I was told blockchain would be the solution to many problems
• edwnjos 6y ago
  Asking for Ethereum to be usable by anybody is like asking for machine code to be usable by anyone. Ethereum should focus on innovation (desperately) whilst other smart people and entrepreneurs should be working layers on top of ethereum so its more accessable to people like us.
• labrador 6y ago
  Most everything fun thing that I used to do is no longer fun anymore.
  • jasonrodrigues 6y ago
    And that is?
    • labrador 6y ago
      I don't do the Macarena when the song comes on
• bitcoin01 6y ago
  And there I was entertaining the idea of becoming a smart contract developer for fun and profit. Programmable money sounds very appealing and I can see so many usecases... if only we could use a proper language like Kotlin to develop smart contracts.. Any solidity dev that can give us some feedback of what it's like to work full time on this platform? P
  • yulaow 6y ago
    Short answer: it is Hell. Long answers: - "linking libraries" between FE and blockchains are constantly broken, have _a_lot_ of undefined behaviours, and their error codes are few and totally opaque to what's really happening. Bonus part: they also change fast, a lot, and mostly with breaking changes. See web3.js and ether.js issues if you wanna cry - you mostly will have to use third party services like infura or web browser plugins like metamask to get a working user experience but it will be an extremely poor user experience. We currently use metamask and we had a lot of problems with it, and also it randomly fails making ofc the whole app unresponsive if you don't code defensively of this behaviour. Did I also said they frequently update it deprecating methods and behaviours they suggested just some releases ago? Yeah, enjoy. - solidity is the standard language to write contracts and it is literally the worst language I ever used, with a lot of undefined behaviours I encounter daily. I cannot count the times I had to spend a dozen of hours to find information in obscure blogposts or issues about "hey don't use this language construct with this evm version while passing this type of parameter or the compiler will put a sort-of-nop instead of what you really want". You better create an internal wiki or you'll lose track of what you have to know to avoid to shoot yourself in the foot constantly. - The tools around solidity (Eg the whole Truffle suite) are full of major and minor bugs, will fail on you without explicitly telling why and the documentation is basically not existent. The remix ide is barely passable but you have to use a bunch of disconnected plugins to get something useful. The plugins for common ides (webstorm) or text editor (vscode) are useless at the moment of writing. I'll be honest, I am still working on these dapps just because I believe in the team I am in. If it was for the current state of the technology and the relative constant feeling of burnout I am accumulating, I would have RUN away months ago and moved to a corp job in a super ""boring"" stack (currently thinking about going the .netcore route).
• siraben 6y ago
  > I need a hero, and by that, I mean that I need a usable methodology for building scaleable decentralized apps. Yes, you've heard that right. We don't need more "Ethereum killers" that can do 10x more tx/s than Ethereum. Those are useless. Having worked on large Ethereum smart contracts (running a decentralized auction on chain) over two years, I fully agree with this. Ethereum needs better smart contract languages, better compilers and better dev tooling. As our smart contract written in Vyper (for ease of auditing) grew larger and larger, eventually we failed to deploy on the testnet, and closer inspection reveal that the compiler was blowing up code size which I had to patch[0]. Down the line upstream further increased gas costs by emitting code that zeroed out every member of an array (note the EVM already has all memory set to 0). To support efficient insertion/deletion of bids we had to handroll a skip list on the blockchain(!), because there are no Vyper libraries. On the language development side, things don't look too pretty either, I ended up having to write an EVM assembler from scratch[1], but deeper still are problems such as a lack of a separate call stack in EVM, so procedure calls always end up clunky and implementation-dependent. LLVM to EVM[2] is still experimental, so anyone who is writing a compiler will have to write codegen from scratch. Perhaps eWASM will alleviate some of these concerns. But until then, the entire dev process for writing smart contracts is painful. [0] https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488 https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper/pull/1488 [1] https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs/evm-assembler-talk.pdf https://github.com/ActorForth/evm-assembler/blob/master/docs... [2] https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm https://github.com/etclabscore/evm_llvm
  • px43 6y ago
    If you're working on "large Ethereum smart contracts" you've missed the point. On chain logic should always be as minimal as possible. Uniswap v1 was two vyper files. One was 46 lines, and the other was 496 lines[1]. It took like 20 minutes to read through the code thoroughly, and was one of the most impactful contracts ever deployed to the network. Solidity also matured a lot, which is why Uniswap v2 moved back. If you find yourself writing an EVM assembler from scratch, and you're trying to build something other than a compiler, you have veered way way off course, and need to re-evaluate your system architecture. Feature creep might work well if you're trying to leech money from a government contract or something, or being paid by line of code you contribute, but it's fatal in the Ethereum world. I consulted for a number of projects that made the exact same mistake, and most of them aren't around anymore. [1] https://github.com/Uniswap/uniswap-v1/tree/master/contracts https://github.com/Uniswap/uniswap-v1/tree/master/contracts
• josu 6y ago
  >But I'm telling you that no sane Joe will touch that shit without a serious cryptographic specialist by their side. One would think so, but people in the space are calling each other "degens", one of the best Ethereum devs joked about "testing in production", and for the past year there have been dozens of +1M USD hacks in the space. So yeah, projects are already launching based on zk-rollups and other complex cryptography without "serious cryptographic specialist by their side".
• sonkol 6y ago
  Around 2015 Vitalik Buterin was one of the few crypto geniuses and leaders. For many years the Ethereum project leaders promised ETH 2 to solve some of the issues pointed in the article but they never delivered. It is understandable that they never delivered because there was a lot of complexity involved in improving permissionless blockchains BUT seeing a new wave of blockchains with good foundations makes one think they never delivered because they have not tried enough. Vitalik and his troop have enough financial resources to stimulate or hire top blockchain researchers from top universities around the world. It seems like they never pushed hard to move Ethereum. With enough resources you should think like you are doing the Manhattan or Apollo 11 projects.
  • akudha 6y ago
    seeing a new wave of blockchains with good foundations Can you name a few? I don't know much about this space, just curious
    • sonkol 6y ago
      > Can you name a few? Yes, sure: Avalanche [1], Algorand [2], Solana [3], DFINITY [4], Conflux [5] [1] https://www.avalabs.org/ https://www.avalabs.org/ [2] https://algorand.foundation/ https://algorand.foundation/ [3] https://solana.com/ https://solana.com/ [4] https://dfinity.org/ https://dfinity.org/ [5] https://confluxnetwork.org/ https://confluxnetwork.org/
• trulyrandom 6y ago
  There are some ongoing (and somewhat controversial) efforts to make Ethereum fun for developers again: https://cheapeth.org/ https://cheapeth.org/, https://www.deveth.org/ https://www.deveth.org/.
• aabbcc1241 6y ago
  Compared with Ethereum, "the global computer", zeronet is free as it doesn't require transaction fee to function.
  • insomniacity 6y ago
    ZeroNet is about storage and distribution, not computation or a ledger.
    • aabbcc1241 6y ago
      I would argue ethereum (network) is about distribution as well. As the computation is done repeatedly by each machine locally. The advantage of ethereum over zeronet is it support more flexible verification (via smart contract) while zeronet mainly verify by signature without customizable logics.
• vertis 6y ago
  This is so true. I was playing with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to create artworks a few weeks ago. It seemed like a fun side-project even if I'm not likely to get rich producing something. That died right about the time when it was going to cost me ~$135 in fees to mint the artwork[1]. While I followed through and completed the one artwork, most of the successful artworks are a series of collections. Minting those was prohibitively expensive at the time of writing. [1]: https://vertis.io/2021/02/03/exploring-nfts/ https://vertis.io/2021/02/03/exploring-nfts/
• haolez 6y ago
  I was away from the crypto space for a while and I decided to try shorting some currencies yesterday using a DEX based on Ethereum. I wanted to create a position with 1000 dollars. The estimated fee for my transaction was 490 dollars. Something is broken in this environment.
  • artogahr 6y ago
    How does that even happen?
    • 3np 6y ago
      Limited transaction throughput (given by block size * block time) + an open fee market where people outbid each other to get priority. The only reason it's this expensive is that there's enough capital willing to pay the price.
    • eswat 6y ago
      Congested network + fees dictated by the complexity of smart contracts being used (which would be much higer for something like a DEX transaction).
    • px43 6y ago
      Three things. 1. The contract in questions is doing a lot more on chain logic than it should be doing. 2. The network is currently incredibly active, pushing up the average gas cost per transaction. 3. The price of Ethereum itself, in which gas price is denominated, has risen about 10x in the past few months. Usually the prices die down in a couple weeks, but if there is concern that people are being priced out of the network for an extended period of time, miners will raise the global gas limit, and things will rapidly go back to "normal". The thing is though, people are paying the high fees. This chart has a really great breakdown of where all the fees have been going to in the past 30 days: https://ethgasstation.info/ https://ethgasstation.info/
      • zionic 6y ago
        The short version is that a seemingly large number of people are willing to pay out of this world fees to trade on a decentralized, uncensorable currency exchange. This is consuming the entire chains resources at the moment. The good news is that Uniswap (the top gas guzzler) is trying to move to L2 within 90 days. That will allow cheap/instant trades and L1 fees/usage will only occur when depositing or withdrawing. This should free up a lot of network capacity, and the high fees incentivize the devs to hurry up.
• maipen 6y ago
  This constant whining is getting popular nowadays, specially on hn. >ooohh this thing I got in early is now popular Give me a break. Alot of smart people here think they know what matters but they don't. They often point at the technology and this and that, but it doesn't matter, they are all wrong. The price chart is the only thing that matters. Even if you had the best scalable crypto. Would it matter if nobody could make money on it? People only adopt these things to make money because it's not a necessity, unlike In your country where you need, your government's printed money to buy food and survive. Theories sometimes make alot of sense in paper, but reality proves otherwise. In crypto all it matters is price performance. When there is a bear market most people don't want to talk or touch crypto at all. They all want to stay a away, like it is a leprous dog. You can pay for less shit with bitcoin today, than in 2017.
  • BrianOnHN 6y ago
    > they are all wrong That's pretty absolutist. So, if one's right, that makes you all wrong?
  • aww_dang 6y ago
    It shouldn't need to be said, but preference is individual. If I dislike something, a high price tag won't change my preference.
    • wtvanhest 6y ago
      In the case of crypto, it probably should. The reality is that there is so much compute power aimed at BTC/ETH, that if you try to use a 'cheap' crypto currency, it is susceptible to compute power attacks or at the very least, hasn't been battle tested against non-compute attacks. IMO, if you are going to write a smart-contract or "invest" in crypto, you should have an extremely good reason to do it anywhere but ETH/BTC. The price and value of the chain give an signal of security.
      • aww_dang 6y ago
        Price isn't equal to utility. You can illuminate your home cheaply with electricity or expensively with candles. Yet the lower priced version is more effective. Technology advances. Technology is a means to an end. Examine the merits of the technology to determine if it provides utility to help you achieve the ends you desire.
• rawbot 6y ago
  I still hold firm to my belief that, whatever the initial intentions the idea of cryptocurrency had, since 5 or 6 years ago, cryptocurrencies are the MLM of the tech world. I even knew a few non-techies acquaintances that almost got roped into it (in the figure of thousands of USD) with the same pyramid scheme manipulation techniques and terminology.
  • zionic 6y ago
    Personally, I find the crypto-skepticism on HN a strong indicator that I should buy more.
• deepstack 6y ago
  >They announced the "Monero Enterprise Alliance." An inside joke, supposed to piss off other projects that had started to take themselves too seriously. Being slightly confused that day myself, I now can't recall if the effort had ever been successful. But in any case, I can't recommend buying Monero. It's useless. Why is Monero useless? Is because of transaction fee too high?
  • myndpage 6y ago
    It's a meme in the monero community. "Don't buy monero". Monero fees are actually really low. On average 0.021 cents right now.
• TruthWillHurt 6y ago
  Face it - there are no users for Dapps. Top apps get ~50k users. That's nothing. Whenever I think about creating something in Ether, I apply the "do I really need blockchain" question to it, and combined with low user count I realize I'll have a much larger audience without Ether.
  • erikbye 6y ago
    Maiar has hundreds of thousands.
    • TruthWillHurt 6y ago
      Does it? does this app that lauched January this year, the ONLY app on the Elrund blockchain, which itself launched last year, have hundreds of thousands of users? Simple answer - no, it does not.
• Tepix 6y ago
  Avalanche offers the EVM, fast transactions and low fees. And a lot more than just the EVM on the C chain. Sounds like the ticket, doesn't it?
• milchek 6y ago
  >"What's Ethereum's killer app?" we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It's the world's best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. Hit the nail on the head - for now. Yes, DeFi is what kicked things off last year and people can now trade their favourite altcoins, borrow crypto, and even leverage trade on decentralized exchanges. It's also true that what everyone is trading are mostly other coins and other projects that they're speculating on - and those projects are just newer forms of the same projects that exist now. We've seen countless projects pop up that are all copies or trying to do similar things; increase throughput, connect blockchains, provide oracles, implement faster and cheaper smart contracts, etc. So, it's easy to look at all this cynically, but I like to hope that eventually this will end up somewhere good - I mean, there is financial incentive, there is the 'new toy' angle, and there are countless talented people who are genuinely curious and trying to improve the various crypto ecosystems. I guess we'll see where this all ends up in 5-10 years.
• nootropicat 6y ago
  For some reason ethereum devs refuse to (recommend to) increase the gas limit, even though it's the only short-term way to decrease fees while increasing decentralization, in a mistaken idea that if a node doesn't run on a raspberry pi (it does) the network isn't decentralized. People run nodes when they need them. Decentralization is a function of fees and node costs, not just node costs. Right now deploying a large contract costs more than a good gaming pc while a node to verify blocks can be a pi with a ssd for a small fraction of the cost. As a result normal people just stay away - fees too high decrease decentralization regardless of node costs. The opposite would make much more sense: few dollars for deployment, gaming pc for nodes. More people would actually run nodes in this scenario. As long as a node only requires a high end pc rather than a server in a datacenter the network can stay decentralized. Even current (very underinvested) geth could handle 50M blocks, which would provide relief until rollups get going and prevent activity from relocating elsewhere. This is the most dangerous, with the danger completely self-imposed, time for ethereum ever. Maybe everything works out and rollups release soon enough, but the risk calculus is completely bonkers.
  • thebean11 6y ago
    The hardware it takes to run a node now isn't the only consideration. Higher gas limit means the storage size of the history grows at a faster rate; every single full node needs to store that history forever.
    • nootropicat 6y ago
      By the time it becomes a real problem (when the db containing state starts to approach 4TB) presumably some other solution would be in place, like state witnesses in blocks (verification without needing to access local state), or other ideas like reducing the size of 'hot' state and requiring witnesses for old state. In any case, it's better to have ethereum with heavier nodes than everything move to a completely centralized DPoS or PoA network.
• weeboid 6y ago
  Make Ethereum great again?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• egypturnash 6y ago
  I'll happily take your etherium if it's no fun any more. I'm low on cash and rent needs paying. 0x9a31DDDC8ddD0949a4Ee6aA6c297e5f517E62d59
• pmarreck 6y ago
  Yeah, that was my feeling about Bitcoin a few years ago after dabbling in it and then getting out (to the tune of 1.25 million... which of course would be much greater now, had I held any... sigh) I originally got into it for the technical aspects of mining being interesting. Then all the speculators came in, then I realized that (perhaps due to my Psych major) I was pretty good at predicting local price maxima, but then after a time that felt too much like stealing from the dumber, which is not a vibe that brings happiness to me, so I got out of it. I'd rather use my intelligence to produce value by coding.
• TechnoTimeStop 6y ago
  Given the hacking climate in our world. And the zero data integrity policy given by the corpo scummies, you have to be a total dumbass bear to think ethereum and block chain technology doesn't have a huge future.
• lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
  The Hacker News community has long been anti-crypto, and as someone deeply involved in the space, these long threads of complaints and diatribes are difficult to handle. Everyone is missing so much context. Ethereum gas prices are astronomical because there's unprecedented demand to use the network: NFT art and collectibles are exploding (NBA TopShot, Foundation, SuperRare, Rarible, OpenSea, etc.) at the same time DeFi applications (Uniswap, Compound, Maker, Aave, Balancer, etc.) are at all time highs. This is the time, in my mind, that it's most exciting to work in crypto, and on Ethereum: demand has been proven and has been sustained (every block full for 1+ year). The naysayers who think this is all for a quick buck are missing the pattern and listening too much to the (admittedly, insanely loud and annoying) shills.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    Tech has major entrenched interests in maintening the financial status quo
  • Retric 6y ago
    HN seems wildly pro crypto compared to most places. It’s like Tesla which isn’t universally supported, but still gets a lot more coverage than Ford. People do bring up quite reasonable objections like environmental costs, but it stories get a lot of upvotes and suggesting many people are strong supporters.
    • keithtom 6y ago
      Re environmental costs, I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system or an equivalent; that is, how much to warm all the offices, the computers and servers, the transportation costs of cars & planes for all the employees. Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental cost.
      • Retric 6y ago
        Comparing the banking sector to crypto is wildly optimistic. Crypto is still smaller than just the Gold market both in number of transactions and total stored value of 9.4 trillion. Gold transactions, mining, and storage still produces significantly less CO2 while also being useful in industry. That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.
• pazimzadeh 6y ago
  It sounds like the only issue is high fees..?
• pjfin123 6y ago
  There's Cheap Eth which is an Ethereum fork with cheaper prices: https://cheapeth.org/ https://cheapeth.org/ .
  • yks 6y ago
    Yeah, where author hardcoded himself 25m coins [1] and bans everyone who mentions it from the official discord. Currency of the future indeed. [1] https://github.com/cheapETH/go-ethereum/commit/412c38434d8d88840452c090e738a672139a73d4 https://github.com/cheapETH/go-ethereum/commit/412c38434d8d8...
    • pjfin123 6y ago
      Didn't know about that. If the point is to just be able to play around with Solidity and smart contracts it doesn't seem like a big deal. The Discord banning sounds sketchy though so maybe not something to use beyond testing.
• meehow 6y ago
  https://cheapeth.org/ https://cheapeth.org/
• ostenning 6y ago
  While there are many people out to make a quick buck in the crypto world, investment fuels innovation. It gives people incentive to build decentralized ecosystems. Given that we are more than ever moving toward a centalised society where corporations have an increasingly tightened grip over the people, decentalised technologies are in my opinion a glimmer of technological hope.
• freeplay 6y ago
  If you share sentiments in this article, checkout cheapETH (cheapeth.org). It's created as a utility token to solve the extremely high gas price problem on the ETH network. All the fun of the ETH network with none of the crazy fees and high barrier of entry. Not trying to shill anything. I missed the boat on early Ethereum and never got a chance to really experiment with the network. I've been doing that with cheapETH and its been a great learning experience.
• treelovinhippie 6y ago
  It lost its way in 2017 during the first bubble when all of the cryptobro speculators flooded the scene. The Sydney Ethereum meetup I started in 2014 suddenly jumped in numbers and became full of wankers in suits wanting to discuss the price, wanting to apply the tech inside financial institutions and explore new regulations. 2017 was worrying. 2018 solidified that Ethereum was merely going to serve the interests of the established financial apparatus. There's no revolution or cryptoanarchy here; only power grabs and new oligarchies.
• wallacoloo 6y ago
  Article summarizes to: "high gas fees are ruining ethereum for me. Other people need to quit using it for things that I personally don't get value from, to free up block space. Or the devs need to scale capacity. I'm a dev, but I don't like contributing to projects which have grown as large as ethereum, or I don't want to do that work. Somebody else please do it for me." Sure, there's truth to it. And if the author reflected more before writing their rant, maybe they could have gotten to some interesting ideas worth discussing: - How do you design a base layer which is general enough to do all the things author enjoys doing with Ethereum? - How do you make this base layer capable of scaling as more people want to use it? These are the existential questions that blockchains like Ethereum have been facing for years. Ethereum has some paths forward: rollups and sharding, and there's a lot of active work on both of these right now. Maybe there's room for useful discussion around why these are taking relatively long to ship, and how can we ship them faster or avoid hitting these same limitations in the future? But I feel like these discussions are already happening, every day in this space and in a hundred different forums. There are hundreds of people all working to address the author's pain points across dozens of different projects. These things are being worked on. It just takes time. Nothing happens overnight.
• pedalpete 6y ago
  [The internet isn't fun anymore - 2014](https://www.puregeekery.net/2014/11/17/internet-isnt-fun-anymore/ https://www.puregeekery.net/2014/11/17/internet-isnt-fun-any...) [Computers aren't fun anymore - 2011](https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/132771-Why-computing-just-isn-t-fun-anymore https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread.php/132771-Why-compu...) It seems much of Tim's arguments revolve around the expense of transactions. But what about building on Nano if the cost on etherium is too high? Or any other lower cost alternatives? I'll admit, I have no idea what the transaction cost on Polkadot is, but there are lots of other interesting projects. I agree with Tim's disappointment that the cost has risen to the point where it is likely hindering experimentation, which is probably what the crypto space still requires, but if that is the problem, let's focus on that.
• thejeremyweaver 6y ago
  Have you looked at building dapps on Bitcoin/Stacks (STX)? Clarity, Radiks and Gaia by Blockstack offer scalability and an easy on-ramp to smart contact development.
• awesomesuce11 6y ago
  Timduab should check out cheapETH. Its Eth but cheap. ....
• awesomesuce11 6y ago
  Timdaub should check out cheapETH ... it Eth but cheap...