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Interview with Vitalik Buterin on ETH2, Scaling Plans, NFTs, etc.

144 points by donsupreme 6y ago

cphoover 6y ago
I'm all for the potential of cryptocurrency... But can we all agree NFTs are dumb though?
- wtf_is_up 6y ago
  No
- xrd 6y ago
  I think they are dumb. But, people are getting more and more used to having a lot less physical things. Maybe the truth is they don't really care about the thing itself, but the feeling they are special because they hold it, and others don't. For that reason, maybe NFTs are going to be valuable. I didn't say, intentionally, they will be useful, just valuable. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Things don’t need a coherent reason to be thought valuable like “feeling special” they can be thought of as valuable just because everyone else thinks of them that way. The problem is that a sudden lack of confidence causes valuable things without backing to collapse in value. Tulips and every other bubble that collapsed ever. That we’re seeing NFTs trading well isn’t an indication that it’s the art behind them that matters rather than the popular view of it as an asset.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > I'm all for the potential of cryptocurrency... But can we all agree NFTs are dumb though? Sure, given how they're being used for now; but with some refinement this could displace deeds and titles for property for instant verification. Possibly even validating credentials and degrees and maybe even passport and associated visas. I'm not sure how you get over the enforceability aspect, but I can see a country like Estonia could opt to build their architecture around this. Also, if I'm honest ETH is the last blockcahin of the big 3 that I'd consider putting something critical given all the exit scams: DAO and the first ETH etc...
- fasteddie31003 6y ago
  Art NFT is dumb in my opinion. However, I'd love NFTs to prove ownership of car titles or real estate. Think of how much easier transfer of ownership of titled assets would be with NFTs.
  - sputknick 6y ago
    I think you nailed it. NFTs could be useful for a lot of boring applications. What if your software license was an NFT that you verified every time you opened it. Or maybe a book you bought on Amazon for the kindle. That way you could sell these digital assets you own.
    - tantalor 6y ago
      How does verification work? How do you prohibit duplication? If you need a central server for verification then blockchain is pointless.
      - tastyfreeze 6y ago
        I have thought about this quite a lot. NFT for software license would only work for applications that work with the blockchain. Something like a blockchain client where the user needs to authenticate to interact with the blockchain. Without authentication the application is useless. With authentication their account/wallet would have a license key and software use authorized. For other types of software, without authenticating to the blockchain, there is no way to verify that the user is the owner of the license.
        tantalor 6y ago
        But how do you check the user with the token is the actual owner? Do you need to add a transaction to the ledger for each use/verification?
        tastyfreeze 6y ago
        If they are authenticated to their ledger account then simple possession of the token in the account is sufficient verification. The use case I considered was a client for trading on XRPL. For an application like this they are going to be signing transactions to interact with the ledger. If they are able to sign and own a license token in their ledger account then they are the valid user.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Fabrica.land uses NFTs to transact on real estate properties in less than a minute. I wouldn't call that use case dumb. (disclosure: I have interest in the company)
  - bsaul 6y ago
    interesting, but who needs to transact on real estate properties in less than a minute ?
    - random5634 6y ago
      People who don't mind their $1B portfolio being stolen in a minute?
    - simonebrunozzi 6y ago
      It's not just about speed, in this case it's more about lower costs.
  - JeremyBanks 6y ago
    I would call that use case very dumb.
- kemonocode 6y ago
  NFTs are fine to tokenize things that are valuable because they are limited, say, like property deeds. You own the token, you own the deed, and it's possible to establish an one-to-one relationship. Attaching a token to something that's inherently reproducible such as digital art yet with granting no means to actually enforce copyright is pretty much lunacy and it's just muddying the waters further when it comes to cryptocurrency.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    Imagine getting evicted from your house because your realtor accidentally used = instead of == for comparison in the smart contract. The strength of smart contracts are also their greatest weakness - they're code, so any bug in the code is a de facto rule of the contract.
    - diab0lic 6y ago
      Yeah there are all kinds of edge cases when a digital token represents ownership of a physical object that just aren't accounted for. What if I get foreclosed on but smash the hard drive containing the key out of spite. Who owns the house now? The chain says me, the law (central authority) says the bank and under the rules we live by today the central authority is correct. What now?
  - ska 6y ago
    > say, like property deeds. The problem with this line of thought is that the Venn diagram of cases where there is a potential natural fit for NFT and the cases where there is both a need for them and likelyhood of adoption may well have an empty intersection. Property deeds are a good example. They can't practically replace the current system without radically rethinking that system, and it's unclear that the stakeholders would find any compelling reason to consider that. Do you have a compelling example?
    - frongpik 6y ago
      e.g. a secret bank account that can be accessed by presenting a token. It's like a transferrable password: once it's given to someone, the previous owner forgets it.
- ChrisClark 6y ago
  Yeah, just as dumb as buying an original art piece for your wall instead of a print. But... it's not dumb to other people, just you and me. Other people like buying things that are provably 'only theirs'.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    When you buy a painting you have genuine rights to the physical object. When you buy an NFT you have genuine rights to the NFT but usually none to the linked item. When you buy digital art more normally you’re essentially licensing use of it within a specified context. As you do with other IP. In theory you could do that with NFTs I think but in practice it doesn’t seem to be the case.
    - krrrh 6y ago
      The Venn diagram overlap between people with sizeable art collections and people who don’t back up their computers and store their passwords on a piece of paper under their keyboards is definitely not zero.
drcode 6y ago
I enjoyed the interview, far ranging topics and enough technical details on the upcoming ethereum roadmap to keep it timely.
fasteddie31003 6y ago
Great interview. Just waiting on the HN hate of crypto to pile in here. Let's applaud the Etherium efforts to reduce energy consumption. Crypto is not perfect but projects like Etherium are making crypto better in terms of energy usage, tx/second, and smart contracts.
- Ceezy 6y ago
  Hate? So when you do POS what happened to the supposed bullet proof security of of crypto coins? Cause I m not to sure how that's compatible. Also I would like to see the chart of adoption of these cryptos in unbanked countries/populations.
  - fasteddie31003 6y ago
    POS = "Proof of stake" here, not the more common use of POS. PoS if implemented with the correct incentives is as secure as PoW. I don't have much faith in crypto helping unbanked populations, as there is a pretty high learning curve. You can easily wipe away all your money if you do a step wrong or loose a private key.
    - _jjkk 6y ago
      It is yet to be proven if it is "as secure" because no PoS network has operated at scale. It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins... Regardless if the network has "correct incentives" or not, things can happen to those stakeholders outside their control, or other incentives could easily develop to act in bad faith against the network.
      - Shoue 6y ago
        > It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins... As opposed to a few stakeholders that have total control of the network because they hold the most computational power? And before you bring up mining pools, you can replicate that in Proof of Stake by creating staking pools.
reedf1 6y ago
This should surely satisfy some of the sceptics. ETH2 solves many of the controversial problems with cryptocurrencies.
- ppf 6y ago
  Seeing ETH2 in full operation would satisfy them more.
MrMan 6y ago
I am going to stake eth 2.0 in hopes that it and other POS coins can provide an alternative to POW (despite any security or other technical shortcomings). And then if prices of POS coins can be made stable, perhaps by the use of synthetic baskets of POS coins, they could achieve some utility beyond hoarding
- delaaxe 6y ago
  Can you delegate your stake to a validator node without having to use an exchange?
  - DennisP 6y ago
    You can stake directly if you have 32 ETH. There's also at least one decentralized staking pool being worked on, but I don't think it's live yet.
  - casi 6y ago
    There are services like Lido which is live, and RocketPool which is launching soon. You can essentially just buy lido staked ether (steth) on uniswap, steth is a token which represents staked ethereum and accrues interest via rebasing. RocketPool would be the preferred method once it is live as it maintains the decentralised ethos letting people run rocketpool nodes and anyone pool any amount they want, like how mining pools work today (except running on a raspberry pi, rather than maxing out gpus).
zeroxfe 6y ago
Ethereum is on the forefront of some of the hardest problems in distributed systems and security today. If anything, public blockchains have really pushed the edges of research in some of these spaces, particularly around consensus, crypto, and mechanism design.
- dgellow 6y ago
  Also in governance! Lot of research is now financed directly by grants from the Ethereum Foundation! That’s a game changer for researchers. I know a few people who were able to get grants for their research projects, without the need to pass by the traditional academics system (I mean, they are academics but didn’t have to play the usual academics politics game to be funded).
  - jfk13 6y ago
    So instead they were able to get grants on the basis of....what? Knowing some key people involved with Ethereum? Telling a persuasive story on Twitter? Having the right buzzwords in their bio? Sure, "the academics politics game" may often be an issue. But I don't see how "blockchain!" suddenly solves the problem of deciding where research funds should go in a better way.
    - yurielt 6y ago
      I honestly do not know what might be the actual conditions of the academics of the comment above. However in most of the cases of the research funded by the eth fundation it seems, it is because they have a good proposal, that is properly structured and detailed to seem valuable to the foundation. On top of that they likely happen to have an impressive resume and citations that give them the credibility. No need to quite aggressively shill the outdated academic politics, just because you mad about the fact that things like this are better.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      Grants from the Ethereum Foundation work like grants from any foundation that funds research: the foundation has a lot of money and employs people with the expertise to evaluate grant proposals.
swaglord 6y ago
NFTs are dumb for physical items. Who enforces the ownership? Ok so your NFT says you own it. So the centralized governmental police force has to ensure the actual NFT? Defeats the decentralized purpose lol. NFTs are dumb mostly. Digital collector items, ok I get it
- whateveracct 6y ago
  Even for digital collector items, it's dubious. Even NBA Topshot, the golden child of NFTs right now, is only useful when backed by NBA centralized infrastructure. There's a _little_ value of decoupling the ownership from the centralized infra that controls the thing you own..but tbh it's not much different than an NFT for a physical trading card lol.
- the_gastropod 6y ago
  But even for digital collectors items, it still seems dumb to me. Digital things can be copied. There's nothing you can do to prevent copying the payload. And only outside legal authorities can enforce property rights, making the whole blockchain part of it redundant.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I guess we'll just have to wait for the first person to feel robbed and ask for re-evaluation of the NFT collectible principle.. then it will go away.
- ptmcc 6y ago
  Precisely, there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority. At which point it's orders of magnitude easier and more efficient to use a centralized database. I did some contract work with an Ethereum NFT startup several years ago (now defunct), before the recent hype, and the only "value" proposition was that they were selling "genuine" NFTs blessed by particular large consumer brands. Behind the scenes it was all a centralized SQL server that only touched the blockchain when you exported your tokens to a private wallet because that was slow and expensive -- and turns out almost no one actually cared about that part. As long as you left your tokens in custodianship of the company, the company technically owned them as far as the blockchain was concerned. And then even for digital goods where the concept of the "original" is meaningless when exact digital duplicates are zero-cost, just... who cares? What do even own, and why should anyone else respect your "ownership"? All this NFT noise just feels like those scams where you "buy" a plot of land on the moon or name a star. No authoritative body in the world recognizes that claim, and if we ever start colonizing the moon you can be sure as shit that no entity is going to respect your "ownership". It all feels very regressive in the face of decades of efforts of open source and work to liberalize things like copyrights and fair use in software and digital goods and services. Not to mention that it is an environmental disaster.
seanalltogether 6y ago
So i have a pretty clear view of how bitcoin operates, but what i don't understand about ETH is the description of it being a generalized protocol, or a "world computer". They talk about dns or messenger accounts, etc, but is all this data stored on the blockchain? How does the size not balloon out of control?
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  > How does the size not balloon out of control? It does, which is why they are looking into scaling solutions (sharding, layer 2 solutions, etc).
- Geee 6y ago
  It does balloon and has already ballooned. There's company called Infura that hosts most of Ethereum full nodes. Because of this, the system is quite fragile and not properly decentralized. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastructure-provider-infura-is-down https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastru...
  - DennisP 6y ago
    The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by improving light clients.) Now if you want an archive node, that will use a lot more space. But a full node already has the entire transaction history and entire current state. An archive node adds the ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how much of this token did that address own in block number X last year." If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical queries there's no need for it.
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      > The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. > You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. And Ethereum is supposedly doing just over a million transactions a day [1] And it already requires a terabyte of data to support it. That's 1% of Alipay [2] That's 0.02% or thereabouts of Visa [3] How... How many terabytes will it need for those kinds of volumes? [1] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [2] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay [3] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
delaaxe 6y ago
A hacker tries to sell a zero-day exploit in the form of an NFT: https://www.coindesk.com/hacker-selling-cybersecurity-exploit-nft https://www.coindesk.com/hacker-selling-cybersecurity-exploi...
barbegal 6y ago
Vitalik says that layer 1 optimisations can enable a scaling up by a factor of 100 and layer 2 optimisations by another factor of 100. Does anyone know where the evidence to support these claims is? And if scaling up by these huge factors is possible then why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already. I understand that zero knowledge proofs involve a huge amount of complex maths but I didn't think they actually enable a scaling up as they need huge amounts of data in the proof and massive computation.
- cslarson 6y ago
  > why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already They require cutting edge cryptographic and blockchain research and development which has only recently been achieved. Many teams are racing to solve this because there is a fortune to be made for whoever does. So probably these developments will be delivered no later than possibly can be.
- casi 6y ago
  Vitalik actually has an excellent blog post on rollups. [1] As well as the Rollup Centric Roadmap posted last year which is a little more technically specific[2]. All the evidence/math is there to read, or in the developer forums. Currently Ethereum has 15 transactions per second. Optimistic rollups can rollup 200 or so transactions per second into each ethereum transaction. Optimistic rollups are launching onto mainnet this month after successful testing for the past few months[3]. So straight away with ORs we can hit 3000tps. Then on top of that general purpose zk-rollups aren't far behind [4][5] and they can get into the thousands of tsp themselves. Once we get data sharding on layer 1 this amplifies the number of rollup transactions we can handle pushing us up to ~100000tps (a combination of increasing how much the main layer 1 chain can handle, and this multiplying with the rollups). And then there is computation sharding further down the line which will push it up again. This has taken so long and hasn't been seen before simply because nobody knew how to do it! The researchers have spent the past 5 years intensely working on it. But its actually starting to happen, and this month too! Which is pretty wild for those of use who've been working on it along the way, lots of previously unfeasible and expensive applications are suddenly going to be possible and cheap. We scale up with rollups this year, then move onto a full Proof of Stake network (not DelegatedPos)early next year, finally ditching energy inefficient PoW to everyones relief, and we have a much greener, better distributed, easy to participate in, scaleable for mainstream use, beautiful ledger. [1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html [2] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... [3] https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ [4] https://aztec.network/ https://aztec.network/ [5] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/

144 points by donsupreme 6y ago

cphoover 6y ago

I'm all for the potential of cryptocurrency... But can we all agree NFTs are dumb though?

wtf_is_up 6y ago
No
xrd 6y ago
I think they are dumb. But, people are getting more and more used to having a lot less physical things. Maybe the truth is they don't really care about the thing itself, but the feeling they are special because they hold it, and others don't. For that reason, maybe NFTs are going to be valuable. I didn't say, intentionally, they will be useful, just valuable. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Things don’t need a coherent reason to be thought valuable like “feeling special” they can be thought of as valuable just because everyone else thinks of them that way. The problem is that a sudden lack of confidence causes valuable things without backing to collapse in value. Tulips and every other bubble that collapsed ever. That we’re seeing NFTs trading well isn’t an indication that it’s the art behind them that matters rather than the popular view of it as an asset.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> I'm all for the potential of cryptocurrency... But can we all agree NFTs are dumb though? Sure, given how they're being used for now; but with some refinement this could displace deeds and titles for property for instant verification. Possibly even validating credentials and degrees and maybe even passport and associated visas. I'm not sure how you get over the enforceability aspect, but I can see a country like Estonia could opt to build their architecture around this. Also, if I'm honest ETH is the last blockcahin of the big 3 that I'd consider putting something critical given all the exit scams: DAO and the first ETH etc...
fasteddie31003 6y ago
Art NFT is dumb in my opinion. However, I'd love NFTs to prove ownership of car titles or real estate. Think of how much easier transfer of ownership of titled assets would be with NFTs.
- sputknick 6y ago
  I think you nailed it. NFTs could be useful for a lot of boring applications. What if your software license was an NFT that you verified every time you opened it. Or maybe a book you bought on Amazon for the kindle. That way you could sell these digital assets you own.
  - tantalor 6y ago
    How does verification work? How do you prohibit duplication? If you need a central server for verification then blockchain is pointless.
    - tastyfreeze 6y ago
      I have thought about this quite a lot. NFT for software license would only work for applications that work with the blockchain. Something like a blockchain client where the user needs to authenticate to interact with the blockchain. Without authentication the application is useless. With authentication their account/wallet would have a license key and software use authorized. For other types of software, without authenticating to the blockchain, there is no way to verify that the user is the owner of the license.
      - tantalor 6y ago
        But how do you check the user with the token is the actual owner? Do you need to add a transaction to the ledger for each use/verification?
        tastyfreeze 6y ago
        If they are authenticated to their ledger account then simple possession of the token in the account is sufficient verification. The use case I considered was a client for trading on XRPL. For an application like this they are going to be signing transactions to interact with the ledger. If they are able to sign and own a license token in their ledger account then they are the valid user.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Fabrica.land uses NFTs to transact on real estate properties in less than a minute. I wouldn't call that use case dumb. (disclosure: I have interest in the company)
- bsaul 6y ago
  interesting, but who needs to transact on real estate properties in less than a minute ?
  - random5634 6y ago
    People who don't mind their $1B portfolio being stolen in a minute?
  - simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    It's not just about speed, in this case it's more about lower costs.
- JeremyBanks 6y ago
  I would call that use case very dumb.
kemonocode 6y ago
NFTs are fine to tokenize things that are valuable because they are limited, say, like property deeds. You own the token, you own the deed, and it's possible to establish an one-to-one relationship. Attaching a token to something that's inherently reproducible such as digital art yet with granting no means to actually enforce copyright is pretty much lunacy and it's just muddying the waters further when it comes to cryptocurrency.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  Imagine getting evicted from your house because your realtor accidentally used = instead of == for comparison in the smart contract. The strength of smart contracts are also their greatest weakness - they're code, so any bug in the code is a de facto rule of the contract.
  - diab0lic 6y ago
    Yeah there are all kinds of edge cases when a digital token represents ownership of a physical object that just aren't accounted for. What if I get foreclosed on but smash the hard drive containing the key out of spite. Who owns the house now? The chain says me, the law (central authority) says the bank and under the rules we live by today the central authority is correct. What now?
- ska 6y ago
  > say, like property deeds. The problem with this line of thought is that the Venn diagram of cases where there is a potential natural fit for NFT and the cases where there is both a need for them and likelyhood of adoption may well have an empty intersection. Property deeds are a good example. They can't practically replace the current system without radically rethinking that system, and it's unclear that the stakeholders would find any compelling reason to consider that. Do you have a compelling example?
  - frongpik 6y ago
    e.g. a secret bank account that can be accessed by presenting a token. It's like a transferrable password: once it's given to someone, the previous owner forgets it.
ChrisClark 6y ago
Yeah, just as dumb as buying an original art piece for your wall instead of a print. But... it's not dumb to other people, just you and me. Other people like buying things that are provably 'only theirs'.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  When you buy a painting you have genuine rights to the physical object. When you buy an NFT you have genuine rights to the NFT but usually none to the linked item. When you buy digital art more normally you’re essentially licensing use of it within a specified context. As you do with other IP. In theory you could do that with NFTs I think but in practice it doesn’t seem to be the case.
  - krrrh 6y ago
    The Venn diagram overlap between people with sizeable art collections and people who don’t back up their computers and store their passwords on a piece of paper under their keyboards is definitely not zero.

drcode 6y ago

I enjoyed the interview, far ranging topics and enough technical details on the upcoming ethereum roadmap to keep it timely.

fasteddie31003 6y ago

Great interview. Just waiting on the HN hate of crypto to pile in here. Let's applaud the Etherium efforts to reduce energy consumption. Crypto is not perfect but projects like Etherium are making crypto better in terms of energy usage, tx/second, and smart contracts.

Ceezy 6y ago
Hate? So when you do POS what happened to the supposed bullet proof security of of crypto coins? Cause I m not to sure how that's compatible. Also I would like to see the chart of adoption of these cryptos in unbanked countries/populations.
- fasteddie31003 6y ago
  POS = "Proof of stake" here, not the more common use of POS. PoS if implemented with the correct incentives is as secure as PoW. I don't have much faith in crypto helping unbanked populations, as there is a pretty high learning curve. You can easily wipe away all your money if you do a step wrong or loose a private key.
  - _jjkk 6y ago
    It is yet to be proven if it is "as secure" because no PoS network has operated at scale. It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins... Regardless if the network has "correct incentives" or not, things can happen to those stakeholders outside their control, or other incentives could easily develop to act in bad faith against the network.
    - Shoue 6y ago
      > It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins... As opposed to a few stakeholders that have total control of the network because they hold the most computational power? And before you bring up mining pools, you can replicate that in Proof of Stake by creating staking pools.

reedf1 6y ago

This should surely satisfy some of the sceptics. ETH2 solves many of the controversial problems with cryptocurrencies.

ppf 6y ago
Seeing ETH2 in full operation would satisfy them more.

MrMan 6y ago

I am going to stake eth 2.0 in hopes that it and other POS coins can provide an alternative to POW (despite any security or other technical shortcomings). And then if prices of POS coins can be made stable, perhaps by the use of synthetic baskets of POS coins, they could achieve some utility beyond hoarding

delaaxe 6y ago
Can you delegate your stake to a validator node without having to use an exchange?
- DennisP 6y ago
  You can stake directly if you have 32 ETH. There's also at least one decentralized staking pool being worked on, but I don't think it's live yet.
- casi 6y ago
  There are services like Lido which is live, and RocketPool which is launching soon. You can essentially just buy lido staked ether (steth) on uniswap, steth is a token which represents staked ethereum and accrues interest via rebasing. RocketPool would be the preferred method once it is live as it maintains the decentralised ethos letting people run rocketpool nodes and anyone pool any amount they want, like how mining pools work today (except running on a raspberry pi, rather than maxing out gpus).

zeroxfe 6y ago

Ethereum is on the forefront of some of the hardest problems in distributed systems and security today. If anything, public blockchains have really pushed the edges of research in some of these spaces, particularly around consensus, crypto, and mechanism design.

dgellow 6y ago
Also in governance! Lot of research is now financed directly by grants from the Ethereum Foundation! That’s a game changer for researchers. I know a few people who were able to get grants for their research projects, without the need to pass by the traditional academics system (I mean, they are academics but didn’t have to play the usual academics politics game to be funded).
- jfk13 6y ago
  So instead they were able to get grants on the basis of....what? Knowing some key people involved with Ethereum? Telling a persuasive story on Twitter? Having the right buzzwords in their bio? Sure, "the academics politics game" may often be an issue. But I don't see how "blockchain!" suddenly solves the problem of deciding where research funds should go in a better way.
  - yurielt 6y ago
    I honestly do not know what might be the actual conditions of the academics of the comment above. However in most of the cases of the research funded by the eth fundation it seems, it is because they have a good proposal, that is properly structured and detailed to seem valuable to the foundation. On top of that they likely happen to have an impressive resume and citations that give them the credibility. No need to quite aggressively shill the outdated academic politics, just because you mad about the fact that things like this are better.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    Grants from the Ethereum Foundation work like grants from any foundation that funds research: the foundation has a lot of money and employs people with the expertise to evaluate grant proposals.

swaglord 6y ago

NFTs are dumb for physical items. Who enforces the ownership? Ok so your NFT says you own it. So the centralized governmental police force has to ensure the actual NFT? Defeats the decentralized purpose lol. NFTs are dumb mostly. Digital collector items, ok I get it

whateveracct 6y ago
Even for digital collector items, it's dubious. Even NBA Topshot, the golden child of NFTs right now, is only useful when backed by NBA centralized infrastructure. There's a _little_ value of decoupling the ownership from the centralized infra that controls the thing you own..but tbh it's not much different than an NFT for a physical trading card lol.
the_gastropod 6y ago
But even for digital collectors items, it still seems dumb to me. Digital things can be copied. There's nothing you can do to prevent copying the payload. And only outside legal authorities can enforce property rights, making the whole blockchain part of it redundant.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I guess we'll just have to wait for the first person to feel robbed and ask for re-evaluation of the NFT collectible principle.. then it will go away.
ptmcc 6y ago
Precisely, there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority. At which point it's orders of magnitude easier and more efficient to use a centralized database. I did some contract work with an Ethereum NFT startup several years ago (now defunct), before the recent hype, and the only "value" proposition was that they were selling "genuine" NFTs blessed by particular large consumer brands. Behind the scenes it was all a centralized SQL server that only touched the blockchain when you exported your tokens to a private wallet because that was slow and expensive -- and turns out almost no one actually cared about that part. As long as you left your tokens in custodianship of the company, the company technically owned them as far as the blockchain was concerned. And then even for digital goods where the concept of the "original" is meaningless when exact digital duplicates are zero-cost, just... who cares? What do even own, and why should anyone else respect your "ownership"? All this NFT noise just feels like those scams where you "buy" a plot of land on the moon or name a star. No authoritative body in the world recognizes that claim, and if we ever start colonizing the moon you can be sure as shit that no entity is going to respect your "ownership". It all feels very regressive in the face of decades of efforts of open source and work to liberalize things like copyrights and fair use in software and digital goods and services. Not to mention that it is an environmental disaster.

seanalltogether 6y ago

So i have a pretty clear view of how bitcoin operates, but what i don't understand about ETH is the description of it being a generalized protocol, or a "world computer". They talk about dns or messenger accounts, etc, but is all this data stored on the blockchain? How does the size not balloon out of control?

rawtxapp 6y ago
> How does the size not balloon out of control? It does, which is why they are looking into scaling solutions (sharding, layer 2 solutions, etc).
Geee 6y ago
It does balloon and has already ballooned. There's company called Infura that hosts most of Ethereum full nodes. Because of this, the system is quite fragile and not properly decentralized. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastructure-provider-infura-is-down https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastru...
- DennisP 6y ago
  The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by improving light clients.) Now if you want an archive node, that will use a lot more space. But a full node already has the entire transaction history and entire current state. An archive node adds the ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how much of this token did that address own in block number X last year." If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical queries there's no need for it.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    > The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. > You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. And Ethereum is supposedly doing just over a million transactions a day [1] And it already requires a terabyte of data to support it. That's 1% of Alipay [2] That's 0.02% or thereabouts of Visa [3] How... How many terabytes will it need for those kinds of volumes? [1] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [2] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay [3] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...

delaaxe 6y ago

A hacker tries to sell a zero-day exploit in the form of an NFT: https://www.coindesk.com/hacker-selling-cybersecurity-exploit-nft https://www.coindesk.com/hacker-selling-cybersecurity-exploi...

barbegal 6y ago

Vitalik says that layer 1 optimisations can enable a scaling up by a factor of 100 and layer 2 optimisations by another factor of 100. Does anyone know where the evidence to support these claims is? And if scaling up by these huge factors is possible then why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already. I understand that zero knowledge proofs involve a huge amount of complex maths but I didn't think they actually enable a scaling up as they need huge amounts of data in the proof and massive computation.

cslarson 6y ago
> why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already They require cutting edge cryptographic and blockchain research and development which has only recently been achieved. Many teams are racing to solve this because there is a fortune to be made for whoever does. So probably these developments will be delivered no later than possibly can be.
casi 6y ago
Vitalik actually has an excellent blog post on rollups. [1] As well as the Rollup Centric Roadmap posted last year which is a little more technically specific[2]. All the evidence/math is there to read, or in the developer forums. Currently Ethereum has 15 transactions per second. Optimistic rollups can rollup 200 or so transactions per second into each ethereum transaction. Optimistic rollups are launching onto mainnet this month after successful testing for the past few months[3]. So straight away with ORs we can hit 3000tps. Then on top of that general purpose zk-rollups aren't far behind [4][5] and they can get into the thousands of tsp themselves. Once we get data sharding on layer 1 this amplifies the number of rollup transactions we can handle pushing us up to ~100000tps (a combination of increasing how much the main layer 1 chain can handle, and this multiplying with the rollups). And then there is computation sharding further down the line which will push it up again. This has taken so long and hasn't been seen before simply because nobody knew how to do it! The researchers have spent the past 5 years intensely working on it. But its actually starting to happen, and this month too! Which is pretty wild for those of use who've been working on it along the way, lots of previously unfeasible and expensive applications are suddenly going to be possible and cheap. We scale up with rollups this year, then move onto a full Proof of Stake network (not DelegatedPos)early next year, finally ditching energy inefficient PoW to everyones relief, and we have a much greener, better distributed, easy to participate in, scaleable for mainstream use, beautiful ledger. [1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html [2] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... [3] https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ [4] https://aztec.network/ https://aztec.network/ [5] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/