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Cryptography behind the top cryptocurrencies
- monstersinF 6y agoThis is a great table of information. It’s news to me that Tether is based on Ethereum tokens. If Ethereum falls out of favor and offers an appealing 51% attack, or if the proof of stake transition has a vulnerability, would this affect Tether spectacularly and then impact BTC and all other CCs?
- np_tedious 6y agoI believe the answer is yes, but this receives fairly little attention because people are more concerned about Bitfinex treasury and the USD backing than they are about the ethereum dependency
- hanklazard 6y agoYes, tether (and usdc + dai stablecoins) relies on ethereum for security. Edit: this is one of the reasons I’m optimistic about the future of ethereum. The stablecoins have become so critical for defi that it’s hard to imagine another platform (like polkadot) gaining critical traction needed to overtake it.
- CptFribble 6y agoSerious question from a crypto noob - what's the point of defi systems if they're all built on stablecoins and depend on the value of a fiat currency at the end of the day? Especially for permanently-deflationary coins like BTC?
- rawtxapp 6y agoYou can use them without being affected by Bitcoin's volatility on the same kind of blockchains and smart contract platforms. And you can borrow stablecoins for your BTC without selling it.
- cslarson 6y agoNon-pegged stablecoins are now starting to be experimented with on Ethereum, Rai and Bank/Float, for example.
- mandelbrotwurst 6y agoThey're built on Ethereum, not stablecoins. The stability of the network currently relies on stablecoins only in the sense that people use stablecoins to store wealth in situations where fiat is more stable than crypto.
- duskwuff 6y agoCynical take: a lot of it is effectively financial cargo-culting -- building structures which mimic traditional financial products, like banks, loans, and investment funds, in the (fruitless) hope that this will create value.
- kfarr 6y agoI thought the same thing about NFT art trading. But if everyone is part of the cargo cult and the cult is making real money then is it still a cargo cult?
- duskwuff 6y ago> But if everyone is part of the cargo cult and the cult is making real money False premise. Some people are making money, but only at the expense of others. There is no value being created here.
- ben_w 6y agoOne of the stories about how cargo cults were first noticed was someone needing to do an emergency landing, noticing a runway that wasn’t on their charts, landing, and finding the locals had built it so that aircraft full of cargo would land on it. Given it was successful despite being a cargo cult (the plane landed QED), by symmetry the ability to make money with cryptocurrency doesn’t make it not an economic cargo cult. (One must do more that this to show that it is a cargo cult, rather than that it is still possible for it to be, which I say despite liking the cargo cult comparison and being generally very against cryptocurrency).
- herbst 6y agoHave you seen fiat fonds these days? Most stablecoin defi looks a lot more promising than anything my bank has to offer.
- traeregan 6y agoAs far as non-ERC20 stablecoins go, Terra’s UST is gaining a lot of traction this year as well.
- gunshai 6y agoTerra Labs and the Luna token is one of the few projects out of this latest cycle that has really energized me. I was completely blown away with the design of the Anchor protocol that they just launched I really hope that project continues its success.
- anthony_barker 6y agohttps://wallet.tether.to/transparency https://wallet.tether.to/transparency Tron is growing ... USDC is multichain as well.
- shp0ngle 6y agoTether is on more networks. I think the most popular one is TRON (most Tether is traded on TRON) but I might be wrong edit: Yeah I remember correctly https://www.coindesk.com/tron-ethereum-tether-transaction-count-volume-data https://www.coindesk.com/tron-ethereum-tether-transaction-co... The irony of most cryptocurrency market cap depending on mostly scam currency TRON is not lost upon me.
- ketamine__ 6y agoJustin Sun is good at promoting.
- ur-whale 6y ago>Justin Sun is good at promoting. In less PC-ridden times, this would just have been: "Justin Sun is a bald-faced liar."
- CryptoPunk 6y agoMost Tether is on Ethereum: https://wallet.tether.to/transparency https://wallet.tether.to/transparency Most Tether volume is also on Ethereum, as the article above notes: >>Notably, the total value of tether transacted on Ethereum is still larger than Tron, signaling that primarily smaller transactors are migrating. Meanwhile, parties executing larger transactions who can presumably afford higher fees seem comfortable continuing to use Ethereum. The big issue is that there's simply no space on Ethereum for smaller transactions. Hopefully some of this volume will migrate to Ethereum's zkRollups, namely Loopring and zkSync, which increase Ethereum's maximum throughput from 30 to 3,000 ERC20 token transfers per second.
- shp0ngle 6y agoAh. Okay then
- Sargos 6y agoEthereum powers 95% of the work in the cryptocurrency space. If Ethereum has a fundamental flaw then it would be quite tragic for the entire industry and might cause years of chaos and set back crypto for a generation. Thankfully Ethereum is one of the most scrutinized and well tested systems ever made so the chances of that are extremely low and there's not any reason to worry.
- wtvanhest 6y agoI started learning how to program some solidarity for fun and just to understand the whole concept better. While I agree that in the short-run 1-5 years, it’s extremely unlikely that something wins agains ETH, but... in the long run, 10-20 years, it’s a lot harder to know. Not sure what that means for anything, but it’s important to remember that what we consider the gold standard today, BTC, ETH, they may be tomorrow’s tin.
- herbst 6y agoThis has happened before. A few years ago many did not understand the concept of smart chains and rather invested into new litecoin clones, all of which are replaced in popularity by smart chain tokens only a few years later. I agree but i think 5 years is enough to disrupt everything.
- anthony_barker 6y agoIt used to be.. Tron is almost 50% now of USDT issued. https://wallet.tether.to/transparency https://wallet.tether.to/transparency Also USDC is on several chains as well including Stellar.
- iamacyborg 6y agoUSDT is a fraud though, I wouldn’t believe anything associated with it.
- smoovb 6y agoTether is as legitimate as any non-US, non-regulated, company unable to do business with reputable banks or auditors could be. The NY AG case went a good way to legitimize them.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoNot really as Ethereum is a public ledger, with copies of the full transaction history distributed across thousands of computers around the world, so any malfunctions can be easily identified and fixed.
- postalrat 6y agoIf consensus was so easy we wouldn't need a blockchain or mining.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoIt's because Ethereum uses a blockchain and mining that there are thousands of computers with identical copies of the transaction history.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- russbars 6y agoPerhaps this only refers to the cryptography used to sign transactions, i.e., cryptography used by the clients or wallets. For instance, Algorand uses additional cryptography such as verifiable random functions. Nevertheless, extremely valuable.
- kurthr 6y agoRelated question, what are the dominant NFT platforms. I only know of ETH based tokens, but I assume there are others... which is a bit weird for something that's supposed to be unique. Could you be unique on two different platforms and sell a token "twice"?
- str33t_punk 6y agoYou can but only really one will have value There are crypto punks on Binance / Tron but they are pretty worthless. Everyone knows which one is the real one For most projects that go multi chain it’s all about wrapping. I.e the main item is on ETH but they are wrapped when on other chains.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoCryptoPunks are Ethereum-based. I think someone cloned them into TRON and Binance Smart Chain.
- drak0n1c 6y agoRare Pepes built on Bitcoin had some popularity in Venezuela. Besides ETH there isn’t widespread usage for collectibles. There is an assumption that eventually more performant technologies like Cardano or Hashgraph may prove themselves and take up the collectible niche. https://cryptoinsider.media/venezuelan-developers-using-bitcoin-rare-pepes-fight-dismal-economy/ https://cryptoinsider.media/venezuelan-developers-using-bitc...
- ddeyar 6y agoHave a look into https://tezos.com/ https://tezos.com/ its PoS The ecological footprint it important in the nft space. https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-the-ecological-footprint-c58029faee44 https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-t... At the moment approximately 40 transactions per second NFTs on Tezos: https://kalamint.io/ https://kalamint.io/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ Minting a NFT costs about 1 cent A collectible card game called emergents will be based on the chain. https://coa.se/ https://coa.se/ Further adoption: Recently the biggest retailer in france has announced to develop a stable coin on tezos. https://www.coindesk.com/french-firm-launches-euro-stablecoin-with-monthly-audits-from-pwc https://www.coindesk.com/french-firm-launches-euro-stablecoi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Casino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Casino
- nayuki 6y agoMore cryptographic details: Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 hash functions for public keys. It uses double-SHA-256 for transaction IDs and blocks (mining).
- garmaine 6y agoMore recent segwit-native addresses on bitcoin use SHA256 only.
- gkfasdfasdf 6y agoAfter watching the latest Veritasium video about how Newton figured out a novel approach to solving PI which was dramatically simpler than the previous thousand-year old methods, I wonder if someone will come along and figure out a simple mathematical way to break these encryptions. That would be horrifying of course, but also really cool.
- jhardy54 6y agoThey will! This is called cryptanalysis, and it's very common for ciphers to be weakened over time.
- chrispeel 6y agoPeter Shor did this in the 90s. Lotsa people are working on quantum computers and hoping to, among other things, crack these codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#Quantum_computing_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#Qu...
- ben_w 6y agoI thought the cryptographic basis for BTC was supposed to not be susceptible to Shor’s algorithm, or indeed any known quantum speedup?
- chrispeel 6y agohttps://medium.com/drive-insider/the-quantum-attack-on-bitcoin-d676017024bc https://medium.com/drive-insider/the-quantum-attack-on-bitco... Not just Bitcoin, and not just all other popular cryptocurrencies, but all your web traffic and more are all susceptible to quantum attack.
- ben_w 6y agoConversely: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/59375/are-hash-functions-strong-against-quantum-cryptanalysis-and-or-independent-enoug https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/59375/are-hash-fu... Indicates the best known quantum speedup square roots the search space, and the search space in SHA256 is still too big to search exhaustively.
- CynicusRex 6y ago“Cryptography behind the top pyramid schemes.”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- herbst 6y agoMust be nice to sit on devaluing currencies like USD and EUR these days
- gunshai 6y agoIs Ad hominem really the best you can do?
- CynicusRex 6y agoJust to the potential spectators: that's not an ad hominem.
- wealthyyy 6y agoI read this as Con behind the Crypto.
- escalt 6y agoKind of weird that a page about cryptography has broken https