7 ms·

I always enjoy reading Vitalik's posts. I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even

I always enjoy reading Vitalik's posts. I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even used it once at a hip restaurant in town. Some Bitcoin forum (the name of which escapes me atm) had a bitcoin drip, which would give you a free Bitcoin every once in a while. But then Bitcoin's value exploded, it's not very useful anymore since transaction fees are so high and its value is so volatile, no one can mine it on their home machines, and its ecological disaster. But it used to be just a cool, kind of hacker niche, and was fun to think about the underlying technology and possibilities. Vitalik's explorations with Ethereum have kind of a similar vibe to me. It's neat to think about the tech and how it works, and to try to come up with attacks and such. And if it ever moves to Proof of Stake, I won't have that guilty conscience playing with it. Of course, all of this on top of a $100 billion valuation is kind of frightening and weird. I hate to say it, but I'm not sure I'd mind a crazy crypto crash, just to explore this technology some more without the crazy monetary incentives.

saurik 5y ago
(There exist systems that are already proof of stake, such as Avalanche.)
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Love your work saurik but PoS is a PoS. Ideologically we should be opposed — No oligopolys. No income without capital expenditure. No entrenching inequality into consensus. BTC never was unfun. It’s more fun today than ever. OP is sad they sold.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    I've had btc since 2012 not super early, but early enough that I briefly used mygox. Bitcoin has become toxic, the block size wars were interesting, but they yielded two communities that were less than what they were before the split. Bitcoin has stagnated technologically and Bitcoin cash believes that it will win based off of the principals that governed the split. Bitcoin will be on top for a good while longer, but I'm not interested in it anymore.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      The Bitcoin community got more focused on the fundamentals, long term thinking and actual value preservation. That is not true that it has stagnated technologically — MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning. Getting adopted as an official currency… Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. People got used to the slapdash lose a few hundred million in an eth smart contract world, and expect lambos in weeks. Which we see in the short term with frothy exuberance. The perceived toxicity is skepticism, because we have seen it all before. Same scams different year. Bcash is not to be taken seriously. There is and always will be Bitcoin.
      - hanniabu 5y ago
        > Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. Everything you listed is years old, not cutting edge
        randomhodler84 5y ago
        Please name a “cutting edge” feature that exists in a coin today.
        hanniabu 5y ago
        Ethereum's zk rollups and upcoming sharding
        randomhodler84 5y ago
        Sounds like years old things too, things not yet in production…
        jude- 5y ago
        I'll believe sharding when I see it. It's a much harder problem than it seems. Also, the dirty little secret of zkrollups is that they don't scale the system or make the system more trustworthy in this context. First, the prover, while asymptomatically fast (as one would expect from the PCP theorem), incurs constant factors that are still so high that you need a really beefy server to generate proofs in a reasonable amount of time. Second, even if that wasn't a problem, provers are still bandwidth-constrained and require BFT agreement -- each prover has to process all zkrollup transactions, and a malicious prover can still ignore transactions while generating correct proofs. At best, this leaves provers in a similar position as high-bandwidth chains like EOS, where only a few beefy nodes can feasibly process the requisite transaction load, but a BFT majority of nodes need to agree on state in order to prevent malicious censorship. I honestly think zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs are wasted on blockchains. Imagine if AWS, grid computers, and supercomputers offered a zk prover interface, where they run your computations on beefy hardware and give you a proof that it was faithfully executed, thereby removing themselves from the TCB. I'd pay to use that service before I'd pay to use Ethereum.
PretzelPirate 5y ago
You’ll never be able to avoid the monetary incentives anymore outside of using a testnet. Ethereum testnets have real Dapps on them that you can use. You can also use layer 2 networks on top of Ethereum to avoid high transaction costs.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Another cool piece of crypto tech is mina, there's really interesting bits of math & engineering being done as well as all the shilling, scams and speculation
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Mina, Grin, Beam are all interesting constructions. I’ve played with them but I felt quite nervous. They throw away too much information to be secure. Maybe totally unsuitable for value storage? The lack of audibility means your savings might be invalidated one day. All it takes is a single mistake and the Mina chain become useless, taking out all the embedded txs.
rogueSkib 5y ago
Re: "ecological disaster" I believe this is misinformation, because it assumes that the energy usage is not being well spent - that Bitcoin is a waste - but that assumption could not be further from the truth. Bitcoin's value lies in its absolute scarcity and immutable monetary policy - it preserves your time spent working in a money that cannot be debased by anyone, ever. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. If your savings is constantly at risk of being debased, not only do you lose purchasing power over time, but you're also incentivized to spend it and invest it as quickly as possible, rather than waiting thoughtfully for the best purchase or investment. You're being forced to have an extra job, as an investor, to even remotely come close to making a good investment. This is assuming that's even an option and that you have access to financial institutions in your country. Technology is advancing exponentially - it should bring abundance and higher quality of life to everyone in the world. People will get more for less money, i.e. it is exponentially deflationary. With an inflationary monetary policy, where markets and assets prices are supported by the printing of money and will immediately crash if the printing stops, many nations will be forced to print exponentially to fight the deflation caused by technology. In other words, technology should be saving everyone time and energy as it raises productivity, but inflation forces everyone to work harder to keep up. How can a finite planet support an economic system that demands infinite growth? A money with absolute scarcity solves this by allowing for deflation in prices as technology drives abundance. Fiat and inflationary monetary policy is the root problem driving climate change, and likely many other complex negative externalities. In addition, I would point out that energy usage is not intrinsically bad. Higher per capita energy usage leads to higher quality of life. The climate issue energy poses is within how the energy is produced, and the majority of that problem lies in the emissions from coal power. The good news on the energy production side is that a monetary network using Proof-of-Work incentivizes competition between miners globally. As cheaper (or even free, stranded) energy is made available to miners anywhere in the world, miners anywhere else who pay more for energy are pushed out of profitability and have to shut down shop. The difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin mining means that as more miners compete, those paying the most for energy are forced out of the market. This creates a clear incentive for miners to find the cheapest possible energy, which is predominately green and renewable and drives innovation in the space. Cheaper energy is great for humanity. Check out the recent work by ARK / Square exploring this. Overall, these developments have made me hopeful and optimistic about the future again :)
rglullis 5y ago
You do know that all these experiments happen on testnets, right? If playing with "real money" is what bothers you, just play around on Görli/Ropsten/Rinkeby.

saurik 5y ago

(There exist systems that are already proof of stake, such as Avalanche.)

randomhodler84 5y ago
Love your work saurik but PoS is a PoS. Ideologically we should be opposed — No oligopolys. No income without capital expenditure. No entrenching inequality into consensus. BTC never was unfun. It’s more fun today than ever. OP is sad they sold.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  I've had btc since 2012 not super early, but early enough that I briefly used mygox. Bitcoin has become toxic, the block size wars were interesting, but they yielded two communities that were less than what they were before the split. Bitcoin has stagnated technologically and Bitcoin cash believes that it will win based off of the principals that governed the split. Bitcoin will be on top for a good while longer, but I'm not interested in it anymore.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    The Bitcoin community got more focused on the fundamentals, long term thinking and actual value preservation. That is not true that it has stagnated technologically — MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning. Getting adopted as an official currency… Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. People got used to the slapdash lose a few hundred million in an eth smart contract world, and expect lambos in weeks. Which we see in the short term with frothy exuberance. The perceived toxicity is skepticism, because we have seen it all before. Same scams different year. Bcash is not to be taken seriously. There is and always will be Bitcoin.
    - hanniabu 5y ago
      > Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. Everything you listed is years old, not cutting edge
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        Please name a “cutting edge” feature that exists in a coin today.
        hanniabu 5y ago
        Ethereum's zk rollups and upcoming sharding
        randomhodler84 5y ago
        Sounds like years old things too, things not yet in production…
        jude- 5y ago
        I'll believe sharding when I see it. It's a much harder problem than it seems. Also, the dirty little secret of zkrollups is that they don't scale the system or make the system more trustworthy in this context. First, the prover, while asymptomatically fast (as one would expect from the PCP theorem), incurs constant factors that are still so high that you need a really beefy server to generate proofs in a reasonable amount of time. Second, even if that wasn't a problem, provers are still bandwidth-constrained and require BFT agreement -- each prover has to process all zkrollup transactions, and a malicious prover can still ignore transactions while generating correct proofs. At best, this leaves provers in a similar position as high-bandwidth chains like EOS, where only a few beefy nodes can feasibly process the requisite transaction load, but a BFT majority of nodes need to agree on state in order to prevent malicious censorship. I honestly think zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs are wasted on blockchains. Imagine if AWS, grid computers, and supercomputers offered a zk prover interface, where they run your computations on beefy hardware and give you a proof that it was faithfully executed, thereby removing themselves from the TCB. I'd pay to use that service before I'd pay to use Ethereum.

PretzelPirate 5y ago

You’ll never be able to avoid the monetary incentives anymore outside of using a testnet. Ethereum testnets have real Dapps on them that you can use. You can also use layer 2 networks on top of Ethereum to avoid high transaction costs.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

Another cool piece of crypto tech is mina, there's really interesting bits of math & engineering being done as well as all the shilling, scams and speculation

randomhodler84 5y ago
Mina, Grin, Beam are all interesting constructions. I’ve played with them but I felt quite nervous. They throw away too much information to be secure. Maybe totally unsuitable for value storage? The lack of audibility means your savings might be invalidated one day. All it takes is a single mistake and the Mina chain become useless, taking out all the embedded txs.

rogueSkib 5y ago

Re: "ecological disaster" I believe this is misinformation, because it assumes that the energy usage is not being well spent - that Bitcoin is a waste - but that assumption could not be further from the truth. Bitcoin's value lies in its absolute scarcity and immutable monetary policy - it preserves your time spent working in a money that cannot be debased by anyone, ever. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. If your savings is constantly at risk of being debased, not only do you lose purchasing power over time, but you're also incentivized to spend it and invest it as quickly as possible, rather than waiting thoughtfully for the best purchase or investment. You're being forced to have an extra job, as an investor, to even remotely come close to making a good investment. This is assuming that's even an option and that you have access to financial institutions in your country. Technology is advancing exponentially - it should bring abundance and higher quality of life to everyone in the world. People will get more for less money, i.e. it is exponentially deflationary. With an inflationary monetary policy, where markets and assets prices are supported by the printing of money and will immediately crash if the printing stops, many nations will be forced to print exponentially to fight the deflation caused by technology. In other words, technology should be saving everyone time and energy as it raises productivity, but inflation forces everyone to work harder to keep up. How can a finite planet support an economic system that demands infinite growth? A money with absolute scarcity solves this by allowing for deflation in prices as technology drives abundance. Fiat and inflationary monetary policy is the root problem driving climate change, and likely many other complex negative externalities. In addition, I would point out that energy usage is not intrinsically bad. Higher per capita energy usage leads to higher quality of life. The climate issue energy poses is within how the energy is produced, and the majority of that problem lies in the emissions from coal power. The good news on the energy production side is that a monetary network using Proof-of-Work incentivizes competition between miners globally. As cheaper (or even free, stranded) energy is made available to miners anywhere in the world, miners anywhere else who pay more for energy are pushed out of profitability and have to shut down shop. The difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin mining means that as more miners compete, those paying the most for energy are forced out of the market. This creates a clear incentive for miners to find the cheapest possible energy, which is predominately green and renewable and drives innovation in the space. Cheaper energy is great for humanity. Check out the recent work by ARK / Square exploring this. Overall, these developments have made me hopeful and optimistic about the future again :)

rglullis 5y ago

You do know that all these experiments happen on testnets, right? If playing with "real money" is what bothers you, just play around on Görli/Ropsten/Rinkeby.