10 ms·

Algorand – Fast, low fees and sustainable blockchain

46 points by capableweb 5y ago

capableweb 5y ago
Surprisingly, Algorand hasn't come up on Hacker News a lot judging by (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=algorand%20comments%3E5&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), only finding one previous submission with comments: - Algorand Consensus Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809391 A lot of critique against various blockchains seems solved with Algorand, including environmental damage, high fees for making transactions and slow block times. Thanks to the lightweight and cleverly designed consensus protocol, you can run nodes that participate in the consensus on just a Raspberry Pi if you want to.
- smt88 5y ago
  On HN, the lack of enthusiasm for blockchain certainly has those factors. It also has another factor that Algorand doesn't solve: no one has found a problem that blockchains uniquely solve (other than making cryptocurrencies). There is debate about whether cryptocurrencies are useful or just a speculative market for gambling on useless digital assets, but even if you think cryptocurrencies are truly useful, Satoshi's underlying breakthrough isn't that novel or exciting anymore.
  - kranke155 5y ago
    NFTs have created a global liquid permissionless marketplace for digital art. This never existed before. Ever.
    - sam_bristow 5y ago
      Quite often that 'permissionless marketplace' is happening without the permission of the artists.
      - kranke155 5y ago
        This is a shame but technical solutions are possible and being worked on. A quick verification can also be done in any of the major markets to determine the art is being sold by the artists, which is something I always do.
        ShamelessC 5y ago
        What's the technical solution? That seems intractable.
        kranke155 5y ago
        intractable? how? If it's possible to detect fakes in the real world, it's possible to detect duplicates in digital art. Eventually some sort of image scraping through all the major art networks - Artboard, Behance - will be integrated into NFT platforms to prevent most of this.
        ShamelessC 5y ago
        That all sounds very hypothetical. Content-based de-duplication is an unsolved problem facing many known tradeoffs that can't satisfy the demands of all digital artists in a fair way. The use of sheer automation for this task will fail - humans need to be in the loop. If you're positing a solution with deep learning - again, you're going to have false positives/negatives and humans will need to be in the loop. As in - humans with eyeballs visually examining and verifying claims made by NFT platforms using automated tools. I am not saying any of this is uncertain. But assuming it as a guarantee (unless you are personally working to help create this tech, which I gather you are not) is naive.
        kranke155 5y ago
        The system in the real world requires a lot of humans in the loop as well. What's your point? We just need to make it harder for people to do it, you will never be able to make it impossible. That's holding the digital world to a far higher standard than meatspace, where fraud happens. Youtube has a huge problem with re-uploading of videos where multiple accounts will download and re-upload a video of anything they can get away with. Does that make Youtube useless?
    - spzb 5y ago
      It created a market for something. I don’t think it was art though. Unless you consider the whole concept to be some kind of performance art.
      - kranke155 5y ago
        You can consider whatever you like but eventually it will cross into reality denial. It’s a marketplace for digitally watermarked digital art. Being anti-crypto like this is similar to being an anti-vaxxer for tech. You’re analysing everything through an ideological reality-confirmation bias instead of acting like a scientist and looking for the truth. You don’t want something to be true because you don’t like mRNA/Bill Gates or Bitcoin/Libertarians are at its origin. Instead you should face the truth that this is a marketplace for digital art and that it works. Far simpler than concocting wild theories about 5G or NFTs being performance art. It just works, it’s real and people are using it. Saying “NFTs have no value” is like saying “Bitcoin is not money”. It has been the equivalent of money for 10 years now, so when are you going to give it up?
        gus_massa 5y ago
        I was very skeptical of ICOs a few years ago, and they now disappeared. Is was like a permissionless stock exchange. Is any of them still worth something?
        kranke155 5y ago
        The ICOs were mostly trash. That was obvious. But yes, Ethereum is still around that was ICO. Polkadot. Algorand. Lots of serious projects with interesting solutions. You’re clearly out of the loop so. Just do more research. There are still ICOs for instance there are auctions happening right now on Polkadot.
        TrevorAustin 5y ago
        ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.” They didn’t really go away on their own.
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      What? You email a gallery and they reply with a price and you pay them and your art is shipped to you. NFT people act like art is some unattainable mythical artifact that their JPEGs have somehow liberated.
      - kranke155 5y ago
        You’re literally ignoring half of what I said. Digital art couldn’t be “shipped” to anyone. Having a gallery means you have to be featured in one in the first place - ie gatekeepers. Not permissionless. You have to be not working in the arts to think like this. NFTs were a revolution for digital artists.
        ethanbond 5y ago
        Ah, I did skim over the “digital” part.
    - ketanip 5y ago
      NFT Bay go brrr !!!
  - ccortes 5y ago
    I know a lot of people (including myself) that find blockchain/cryptocurrencies to be great for international money transfers and as a way of saving money using stablecoins with better rates than what we could get on a regular bank. And yes we know about transferwise and such, it would be cool if it could be used in our countries. No, de savings are not insured in crypto, but the insurance we get at local financial institutions aren’t that safe either, it only protects up to a certain amount and years can pass before they pay you back if they pay you at all.
    - scrubs 5y ago
      Consider the following, say in the context of BC: (1) conversion to or from fiat not possible (2) the number of entities accepting BC unchanged. Question: how would your interest in BC change?
  - afurculita 5y ago
    The best recent case that couldn't happen without a blockchain is ConstitutionDAO.
    - coolspot 5y ago
      Kickstarter exists
      - capableweb 5y ago
        Just like MySpace existed when Facebook launched, and no one is using Facebook today. Seems the biggest Kickstarter ever was Pebble, which raised 20 million USD, while ConsititutionDAO seems to have raised ~49 million USD. That's more than double the funds, even while being on a shorter deadline.
        Tepix 5y ago
        Star Citizen raised hundreds of millions without the use of a blockchain.
        capableweb 5y ago
        And so does the multiple of IPOs that happen every day. Does that mean blockchain is useless for that purpose?
    - acjohnson55 5y ago
      Why couldn't it?
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      There have absolutely been rapid meme based crowd funding of projects in the past. Crypto enhances it because there are a lot of people who’ve made so much money that handing it out like candy is something they can do, but that really wasn’t new. Also, they lost.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    Algorand is used by Lofty.AI to track fractional ownership of investment rental properties. It makes transferring ownership (in the LLC that owns the property) easy, in case the lofty.ai company weren't trusted or available to complete the transaction.
- kranke155 5y ago
  Algorand is great but the developer community has (almost completely) converged on Solidity and EVM as the dev platform of choice. A lot of chains have made been made EVM compatible recently. Not sure if this is possible in Algorand yet. But I fear that any alternative will have a hard time.
  - TrevorAustin 5y ago
    Meh, if the boosters are right, it’s very very early in the space, and we see turnover in frameworks, languages, and operating systems in regular tech all the time. Ethereum has a big first-mover advantage, but at least when I dabbled in Solidity a couple of years ago, didn’t seem very well-run?
    - Entwickler 5y ago
      Have you used it alongside truffle suite recently? https://www.trufflesuite.com/tutorial https://www.trufflesuite.com/tutorial I was pleasantly surprised how well put together the development tools felt.
      - Lambent_Cactus 5y ago
        The tooling system was ok even then, but core development seemed listless. Vitalik gave a keynote at a conference I went to and talked about why it was actually good for the ecosystem that he and all the core contributors spent all their time traveling to conferences. Since then, transactions per day on the network have doubled, but gas costs are up 10X in gwei and some truly ludicrous multiplier in dollars. I suspected then that the switch to Proof of Stake and other scaling fixes was the fusion power of ETH, always six months away, and that concern looks really vindicated.
        kranke155 5y ago
        Vitalik is less technical than people think. He’s more of an evangelist.
    - 5y ago
penisverse 5y ago
Does anyone know the differences, pros and cons of algorand consensus vs avalanche consensus?
exdsq 5y ago
I like Algorand. It was the first blockchain I used without knowing it (https://chessarena.com/ https://chessarena.com/) use/used it for storing game results for official Online FIDE games.
mbesto 5y ago
> Algorand created the world’s first pure proof-of-stake foundational blockchain designed for the future of finance. Beyond the elementary requirement of an open, public network, Algorand’s technology enables a set of high performing Layer-1 blockchains that provide security, scalability, complete transaction finality, built in privacy, Co-Chains, and advanced smart contracts that are essential in a FutureFi world. Crypto has a serious marketing/comms problem. I work in tech, have dabbled in crypto and I still do not understand what half of this means.
- emerged 5y ago
  That’s because it doesn’t mean much of anything really. It’s jargon intended to appear meaningful.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Could you share what specific parts of that statement you don't understand? Here is a short glossary: - Pure Proof of Stake - https://www.algorand.com/technology/pure-proof-of-stake https://www.algorand.com/technology/pure-proof-of-stake - Blockchain - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp - Open, public network - "arbitrarily many users are allowed to join the system at any time, without any vetting or permission of any kind" - https://algorandcom.cdn.prismic.io/algorandcom%2Fece77f38-75b3-44de-bc7f-805f0e53a8d9_theoretical.pdf https://algorandcom.cdn.prismic.io/algorandcom%2Fece77f38-75... - Layer-1 https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/layer-1-blockchain https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/layer-1-blockc... - Transaction finality - https://www.algorand.com/technology/immediate-transaction-finality https://www.algorand.com/technology/immediate-transaction-fi... - Co-chains - https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-co-chains https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-co-chains - Smart Contracts - https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/dapps/smart-contracts/apps/ https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/dapps/smart-... Sure, some words in that statement is "marketing jargon", but most of it is actually technical.
kayamon 5y ago
What's it backed by? Who decides the inflation rate?

46 points by capableweb 5y ago

Surprisingly, Algorand hasn't come up on Hacker News a lot judging by (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=algorand%20comments%3E5&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), only finding one previous submission with comments: - Algorand Consensus Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24809391 A lot of critique against various blockchains seems solved with Algorand, including environmental damage, high fees for making transactions and slow block times. Thanks to the lightweight and cleverly designed consensus protocol, you can run nodes that participate in the consensus on just a Raspberry Pi if you want to.

smt88 5y ago
On HN, the lack of enthusiasm for blockchain certainly has those factors. It also has another factor that Algorand doesn't solve: no one has found a problem that blockchains uniquely solve (other than making cryptocurrencies). There is debate about whether cryptocurrencies are useful or just a speculative market for gambling on useless digital assets, but even if you think cryptocurrencies are truly useful, Satoshi's underlying breakthrough isn't that novel or exciting anymore.
- kranke155 5y ago
  NFTs have created a global liquid permissionless marketplace for digital art. This never existed before. Ever.
  - sam_bristow 5y ago
    Quite often that 'permissionless marketplace' is happening without the permission of the artists.
    - kranke155 5y ago
      This is a shame but technical solutions are possible and being worked on. A quick verification can also be done in any of the major markets to determine the art is being sold by the artists, which is something I always do.
      - ShamelessC 5y ago
        What's the technical solution? That seems intractable.
        kranke155 5y ago
        intractable? how? If it's possible to detect fakes in the real world, it's possible to detect duplicates in digital art. Eventually some sort of image scraping through all the major art networks - Artboard, Behance - will be integrated into NFT platforms to prevent most of this.
        ShamelessC 5y ago
        That all sounds very hypothetical. Content-based de-duplication is an unsolved problem facing many known tradeoffs that can't satisfy the demands of all digital artists in a fair way. The use of sheer automation for this task will fail - humans need to be in the loop. If you're positing a solution with deep learning - again, you're going to have false positives/negatives and humans will need to be in the loop. As in - humans with eyeballs visually examining and verifying claims made by NFT platforms using automated tools. I am not saying any of this is uncertain. But assuming it as a guarantee (unless you are personally working to help create this tech, which I gather you are not) is naive.
        kranke155 5y ago
        The system in the real world requires a lot of humans in the loop as well. What's your point? We just need to make it harder for people to do it, you will never be able to make it impossible. That's holding the digital world to a far higher standard than meatspace, where fraud happens. Youtube has a huge problem with re-uploading of videos where multiple accounts will download and re-upload a video of anything they can get away with. Does that make Youtube useless?
  - spzb 5y ago
    It created a market for something. I don’t think it was art though. Unless you consider the whole concept to be some kind of performance art.
    - kranke155 5y ago
      You can consider whatever you like but eventually it will cross into reality denial. It’s a marketplace for digitally watermarked digital art. Being anti-crypto like this is similar to being an anti-vaxxer for tech. You’re analysing everything through an ideological reality-confirmation bias instead of acting like a scientist and looking for the truth. You don’t want something to be true because you don’t like mRNA/Bill Gates or Bitcoin/Libertarians are at its origin. Instead you should face the truth that this is a marketplace for digital art and that it works. Far simpler than concocting wild theories about 5G or NFTs being performance art. It just works, it’s real and people are using it. Saying “NFTs have no value” is like saying “Bitcoin is not money”. It has been the equivalent of money for 10 years now, so when are you going to give it up?
      - gus_massa 5y ago
        I was very skeptical of ICOs a few years ago, and they now disappeared. Is was like a permissionless stock exchange. Is any of them still worth something?
        kranke155 5y ago
        The ICOs were mostly trash. That was obvious. But yes, Ethereum is still around that was ICO. Polkadot. Algorand. Lots of serious projects with interesting solutions. You’re clearly out of the loop so. Just do more research. There are still ICOs for instance there are auctions happening right now on Polkadot.
        TrevorAustin 5y ago
        ICOs disappeared because the SEC stepped into what had been a kind of legal gray area and said “Lol, no. All of this is illegal.” They didn’t really go away on their own.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    What? You email a gallery and they reply with a price and you pay them and your art is shipped to you. NFT people act like art is some unattainable mythical artifact that their JPEGs have somehow liberated.
    - kranke155 5y ago
      You’re literally ignoring half of what I said. Digital art couldn’t be “shipped” to anyone. Having a gallery means you have to be featured in one in the first place - ie gatekeepers. Not permissionless. You have to be not working in the arts to think like this. NFTs were a revolution for digital artists.
      - ethanbond 5y ago
        Ah, I did skim over the “digital” part.
  - ketanip 5y ago
    NFT Bay go brrr !!!
- ccortes 5y ago
  I know a lot of people (including myself) that find blockchain/cryptocurrencies to be great for international money transfers and as a way of saving money using stablecoins with better rates than what we could get on a regular bank. And yes we know about transferwise and such, it would be cool if it could be used in our countries. No, de savings are not insured in crypto, but the insurance we get at local financial institutions aren’t that safe either, it only protects up to a certain amount and years can pass before they pay you back if they pay you at all.
  - scrubs 5y ago
    Consider the following, say in the context of BC: (1) conversion to or from fiat not possible (2) the number of entities accepting BC unchanged. Question: how would your interest in BC change?
- afurculita 5y ago
  The best recent case that couldn't happen without a blockchain is ConstitutionDAO.
  - coolspot 5y ago
    Kickstarter exists
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Just like MySpace existed when Facebook launched, and no one is using Facebook today. Seems the biggest Kickstarter ever was Pebble, which raised 20 million USD, while ConsititutionDAO seems to have raised ~49 million USD. That's more than double the funds, even while being on a shorter deadline.
      - Tepix 5y ago
        Star Citizen raised hundreds of millions without the use of a blockchain.
        capableweb 5y ago
        And so does the multiple of IPOs that happen every day. Does that mean blockchain is useless for that purpose?
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    Why couldn't it?
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    There have absolutely been rapid meme based crowd funding of projects in the past. Crypto enhances it because there are a lot of people who’ve made so much money that handing it out like candy is something they can do, but that really wasn’t new. Also, they lost.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  Algorand is used by Lofty.AI to track fractional ownership of investment rental properties. It makes transferring ownership (in the LLC that owns the property) easy, in case the lofty.ai company weren't trusted or available to complete the transaction.
kranke155 5y ago
Algorand is great but the developer community has (almost completely) converged on Solidity and EVM as the dev platform of choice. A lot of chains have made been made EVM compatible recently. Not sure if this is possible in Algorand yet. But I fear that any alternative will have a hard time.
- TrevorAustin 5y ago
  Meh, if the boosters are right, it’s very very early in the space, and we see turnover in frameworks, languages, and operating systems in regular tech all the time. Ethereum has a big first-mover advantage, but at least when I dabbled in Solidity a couple of years ago, didn’t seem very well-run?
  - Entwickler 5y ago
    Have you used it alongside truffle suite recently? https://www.trufflesuite.com/tutorial https://www.trufflesuite.com/tutorial I was pleasantly surprised how well put together the development tools felt.
    - Lambent_Cactus 5y ago
      The tooling system was ok even then, but core development seemed listless. Vitalik gave a keynote at a conference I went to and talked about why it was actually good for the ecosystem that he and all the core contributors spent all their time traveling to conferences. Since then, transactions per day on the network have doubled, but gas costs are up 10X in gwei and some truly ludicrous multiplier in dollars. I suspected then that the switch to Proof of Stake and other scaling fixes was the fusion power of ETH, always six months away, and that concern looks really vindicated.
      - kranke155 5y ago
        Vitalik is less technical than people think. He’s more of an evangelist.
  - 5y ago

penisverse 5y ago

Does anyone know the differences, pros and cons of algorand consensus vs avalanche consensus?

exdsq 5y ago

I like Algorand. It was the first blockchain I used without knowing it (https://chessarena.com/ https://chessarena.com/) use/used it for storing game results for official Online FIDE games.

mbesto 5y ago

> Algorand created the world’s first pure proof-of-stake foundational blockchain designed for the future of finance. Beyond the elementary requirement of an open, public network, Algorand’s technology enables a set of high performing Layer-1 blockchains that provide security, scalability, complete transaction finality, built in privacy, Co-Chains, and advanced smart contracts that are essential in a FutureFi world. Crypto has a serious marketing/comms problem. I work in tech, have dabbled in crypto and I still do not understand what half of this means.

emerged 5y ago
That’s because it doesn’t mean much of anything really. It’s jargon intended to appear meaningful.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Could you share what specific parts of that statement you don't understand? Here is a short glossary: - Pure Proof of Stake - https://www.algorand.com/technology/pure-proof-of-stake https://www.algorand.com/technology/pure-proof-of-stake - Blockchain - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp - Open, public network - "arbitrarily many users are allowed to join the system at any time, without any vetting or permission of any kind" - https://algorandcom.cdn.prismic.io/algorandcom%2Fece77f38-75b3-44de-bc7f-805f0e53a8d9_theoretical.pdf https://algorandcom.cdn.prismic.io/algorandcom%2Fece77f38-75... - Layer-1 https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/layer-1-blockchain https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/layer-1-blockc... - Transaction finality - https://www.algorand.com/technology/immediate-transaction-finality https://www.algorand.com/technology/immediate-transaction-fi... - Co-chains - https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-co-chains https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-co-chains - Smart Contracts - https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/dapps/smart-contracts/apps/ https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/dapps/smart-... Sure, some words in that statement is "marketing jargon", but most of it is actually technical.

kayamon 5y ago

What's it backed by? Who decides the inflation rate?