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This is not a good article. Or at least, very intellectually dishonest. I could go point by point, but instead, just one will do. The comparison of ETH block v

This is not a good article. Or at least, very intellectually dishonest. I could go point by point, but instead, just one will do. The comparison of ETH block vs Raspberry Pi. It is presented as if it’s some kind overlooked, unsolved issue by silly Ethereum developers. In reality, Ethereum is slower than Raspberry Pi by design, on purpose. It is meant to be runnable by a laptop and not taking the whole CPU. The whole space becomes a lot more interesting once you begin to question, hmmm, WHY do these supposedly smart engineers make decisions I don’t get? There is almost always a WHY. And that is a lot more curious outlook than crypto-bro bashing. And as a sidenote: why do we keep seeing these cheap shots at web3 and crypto regularly rising on HN? They rarely present any new insights.

phphphphp 5y ago
> There is almost always a WHY. Right: to get rich. We (engineers) are just as hungry for capital at any cost as everybody else, there’s no nobility.
- lekevicius 5y ago
  Sure, “to get rich”. Not a very productive discussion. The WHY I meant was “why these technical choices”. Even if we take a cynical view that all of crypto is purely a money extraction machine, we can still learn something new by looking at technical decision reasoning.
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  Also, it’s fun. Seriously some of these people seem to be having a fantastic time. And that’s fine, but that’s separate from it being practical to anyone else.
claytonjy 5y ago
As someone who generally agrees with the authors' "this system is silly" viewpoint, I completely agree about this article. It's very "preaching to the choir", while also having the sort of mean tone that would have undermined strong arguments, let alone the weak ones here. Quite disappointing from a well-credentialed voice.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  I mean imagine this same person writing an article about Raspberry Pi: "you could buy a faster PC for only a few bucks more. These little computers are a waste of time." This kind of dismissal is perplexing. In pursuit of crushing web3 do we stifle curiosity itself?
osrec 5y ago
Whether the criticism is justified or not, anything new is usually given the same treatment.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Nick is also woefully out-of-date regarding scaling solutions; he still thinks lightning channels are SotA.
miracle2k 5y ago
> supposedly smart engineers Imo its clear that a lot of the critical discourse has radicalized to such a degree that it is essentially taken as a given that there are no smart engineers in crypto. You then obviously don't need to ask yourself this question.
- codeflo 5y ago
  No, the critics’ claim is that there are no ethical smart engineers in crypto. Quite an important distinction.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect argument against this. He went into crypto because of ethical reasons (to make a shit ton of money and donate it to the most effective charities and organizations, he's prominent in Effective Altruism circles). I think he's the richest 29 year old ever? Maybe Zuckerberg beat him, but $22.5Bn isn't bad in 3.5 years!
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I'm not so sure. When, as currently, that wealth is generated based on the losses of speculators, the conned, or simply poorly informed, then I'd class Bankman-Fried into the robber-baron class who sought to cement their legacies with philanthropic endeavors instead of their ruthless practices. The means by which they accumulate their wealth are the lens through which we should view their "good works".
      - exdsq 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure - he was donating 50% of his salary at Jane Street prior to starting his current crypto endeavors and has pledged to donate basically everything over the next few years, of which he's already started. Initially staff at his companies had to donate regularly, 1% of fees from his companies are donated, and he advocates others in the space to do the same. The guy basically lives in his office eating fried veg and rice playing League of Legends in his downtime. That money is being made for charities and predominantly comes by enabling trading, which I don't believe is ethically wrong (his general good, in a utilitarian sense, is definitely higher than any qualms one might have against crypto anyway).
manigandham 5y ago
Average laptops are many times more powerful than a Raspberry Pi, and distributed computing with proof-of-work means nodes can contribute as much power as they have/want; no arbitrary design limits are needed. Also the comparison was instructions-per-second between Ethereum's network and a raw CPU. Of course this trade-off in speed comes at the gain of decentralization and other features, however it remains to be seen whether that has really provided any net benefit overall.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Yeah, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You're correct in that we have yet to see if there are any tangible benefits from a "social computer" as it were, and comparing Ethereum to any computer is like comparing a tree to an apple. They're fundamentally different things that exist to solve fundamentally different problems. The "interesting" part of it comes from how we can benefit from small-scale, distributed computing in the long run. The fields history isn't very promising (NFTs had a lot of potential from a logistics standpoint; all we got were lousy thousand-dollar apes), but if people are able to align their incentives properly then I can still see a way forward for smart contracts. The issue is that there is an infinitesimally small chance that we will be able to agree on what it should be used for, and it's likely to languish in the same stupidity/scam hell that other crypto projects have fallen into. We'll either make a revolutionary step forward in trustless computing, or receive a rather expensive lesson about how cool technology does not a desirable product make.
magicjosh 5y ago
> So I still need a DNS name False. You can use Ethereum Name Service. ENS is an on-chain version of DNS that is not controlled by a centralized gatekeeper. >I still need a server, I still need storage False. You can use IPFS and Filecoin to store and serve files not controlled by a centralized gatekeeper. That all said, this article is embarrassing. If you want a some critical ideas of web3, read Moxie's piece: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
- gaadd33 5y ago
  I don't know anything about ENS and was wondering does it work if DNS is down or unavailable in your location?
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    I'm curious about this as well. Here's my simple mental model. DNS lives on the core DNS servers and is replicated elsewhere. DNS being "down" would mean that the core DNS servers were taken down. ENS [1] lives on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS being "down" would mean that Ethereum itself was down. ENS names (.eth) resolve to address hashes on the Ethereum blockchain. So to answer your question, they are parallel systems, so one going down doesn't affect the other. However, the thing I'm wondering is if DNS goes down, does it take ENS with it? I'm not sure how the whole ".eth" part works, is that on DNS. [1] https://docs.ens.domains/ https://docs.ens.domains/
    - gaadd33 5y ago
      Or even as simple as you don't have a working local resolver. But yeah, that's my basic question, is ethereum (and by extension ENS) dependent on DNS or could you run it all without any problems?
- jagger27 5y ago
  Why would anyone want to spend deflationary currency renting an ENS domain today when no one outside the echo chamber space cares about them and DNS is ~10x cheaper? The gas fees alone are brutal.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Well, I'm more than happy to overcomplicate an architecture if it will make me a millionaire. If I had a better audience and contacts I'd certainly do a shitcoin and retire.
civilized 5y ago
You didn't really show anything intellectually dishonest about the article. You just made a contradictory claim with no evidence. And I'm not sure how "crypto is inefficient and slow" is contradicted by "it's inefficient and slow by design".
- lekevicius 5y ago
  Yes, sorry about that. I really wanted to find one conference talk that went into a lot of details about picking gas limit and why (sync catching up, etc), but after googling for a couple of minutes, couldn’t find it.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    If a strong explanation is difficult to find by a proponent of crypto already familiar with the issues then Ethereum, Web3, and crypto in general have a serious communications issue.
    - lekevicius 5y ago
      No disagreement on this point: everything is so decentralized, with very limited “official” content, that providing “authoritative” resources is quite difficult. That talk wasn’t even in Devcon, if I remember correctly.
codeflo 5y ago
It’s true that these limitations are known to the in-crowd, and also to everyone with some CS knowledge that bothered to understand a bit about the technical details. But pro-crypto articles/posts/tweets usually fail to mention any of that, or hand-wave it away with an incorrect reference to Moore’s law. “World computer” is a specific phrase I’ve seen many times referencing Ethereum, and I personally find comparisons with the Raspberry Pi a very effective way to contextualize that. As a consequence of all the selective information going around, some people are drawn into crypto that don’t really understand the limits of the technology’s capabilities. It’s important for the protection of those people to explain, in detail but in plain English, the gap between hype and reality.
inlined 5y ago
They persist because there’s a lot of skeptics who only see the harms that crypto causes: making money laundering trivial with tumblers, making a safe haven for criminal activity by bypassing kYC laws, deriving much of its value from speculators who have no intention to actually use it as a currency, screwing over these customers with market manipulation that is illegal in most markets, making goods like graphics cards impossible to buy, putting a floor on the price of energy to be whatever can be mined, and contributing to global warming by spending the energy of a country on a silly number of transactions. But if you have a good article on why web3 is good For all parties involved, I will read that too.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Your last three points will be solved on Ethereum by proof of stake. It's been in the works for a long time, but now the proof of stake network has been running in production for over a year, with $30 billion in ETH deposited. It's running in parallel to the main network, which is still mining, but the code to merge the networks is running on a public testnet. All their previous upgrades have gone live within a year of their public testnets.
  - inlined 5y ago
    How many joules per transaction is the proof of stake network? How many tps can it perform?
    - DennisP 5y ago
      Based on observations, it looks like the proof of stake network will drop Ethereum's energy usage by about 99.95%. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ It can do this because it doesn't rely on any sort of "work." It's just another internet protocol. Proof of stake doesn't have anything to do with tps, so that won't change significantly. The solutions to that are rollups (second layers that inherit the full security of the main chain) and sharding (which multiplies the capacity of rollups). Some rollup systems are in production today, capable of a couple thousand tps. According to the most recent plan I saw, sharding would multiply that by twenty, initially.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ineedasername 5y ago
Saying it's slow on purpose does not address the author's criticism unless you elaborate by explaining why that was the design decision and how the tradeoff is better than the author's alternative.
magicjosh 5y ago
Re: cheap shots at web3 and crypto regularly rising on HN? I started a thread here to collect well-aimed shots at web3 and crypto: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30132617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30132617
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
8note 5y ago
The why is that they introduced a ton of problems by choosing a bad model to implement their systems. Their problems would go away if they switched to a tool built for the job instead of using crypto. It's fun building around a fundental design flaw, but it's only for toy projects
tialaramex 5y ago
> They rarely present any new insights. I feel like pretty often there's a new "crypto" toy, claiming that this time it's all different, this isn't a scam, and we need to stop talking about whatever was hot last week and grasp that this latest thing is definitely the future. We get plenty of those on HN too. So you'd expect a counter-balancing flow of cynicism, and yeah, it's not going to have a lot of new insight because scams are more the same than they are different. If you fell for a pyramid scheme where you're supposedly involved in property investment, and then years later fell for a different pyramid scheme where you're supposedly selling nutritional supplements based on organic fruits, you might feel like these are completely different business, why are the posts saying "This is a pyramid scheme" just reciting the same things each time when the property investment and the fruit pills were so different? Well because that's just window dressing, it didn't matter, the essence of the pyramid scheme was the incentive structure, the fact that, honestly, you couldn't make money from the actual "business" only from the pyramid. How the "business" supposedly worked was irrelevant.
analognoise 5y ago
"WHY do these supposedly smart engineers make decisions I don’t get?" There's a quote: engineers can do for $1 what any fool can do for $2 (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1009994-an-engineer-can-do-for-a-dollar-what-any-fool https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1009994-an-engineer-can-do-...) So an engineer that made a system that was 1/5000 the speed and thousands of times the cost of a $45 computer wouldn't be a smart engineer. They'd be history's shittiest engineer ever. Web3 people aren't good engineers. At all.

phphphphp 5y ago

> There is almost always a WHY. Right: to get rich. We (engineers) are just as hungry for capital at any cost as everybody else, there’s no nobility.

lekevicius 5y ago
Sure, “to get rich”. Not a very productive discussion. The WHY I meant was “why these technical choices”. Even if we take a cynical view that all of crypto is purely a money extraction machine, we can still learn something new by looking at technical decision reasoning.
coffeefirst 5y ago
Also, it’s fun. Seriously some of these people seem to be having a fantastic time. And that’s fine, but that’s separate from it being practical to anyone else.

claytonjy 5y ago

As someone who generally agrees with the authors' "this system is silly" viewpoint, I completely agree about this article. It's very "preaching to the choir", while also having the sort of mean tone that would have undermined strong arguments, let alone the weak ones here. Quite disappointing from a well-credentialed voice.

magicjosh 5y ago
I mean imagine this same person writing an article about Raspberry Pi: "you could buy a faster PC for only a few bucks more. These little computers are a waste of time." This kind of dismissal is perplexing. In pursuit of crushing web3 do we stifle curiosity itself?

osrec 5y ago

Whether the criticism is justified or not, anything new is usually given the same treatment.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago

Nick is also woefully out-of-date regarding scaling solutions; he still thinks lightning channels are SotA.

miracle2k 5y ago

> supposedly smart engineers Imo its clear that a lot of the critical discourse has radicalized to such a degree that it is essentially taken as a given that there are no smart engineers in crypto. You then obviously don't need to ask yourself this question.

codeflo 5y ago
No, the critics’ claim is that there are no ethical smart engineers in crypto. Quite an important distinction.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect argument against this. He went into crypto because of ethical reasons (to make a shit ton of money and donate it to the most effective charities and organizations, he's prominent in Effective Altruism circles). I think he's the richest 29 year old ever? Maybe Zuckerberg beat him, but $22.5Bn isn't bad in 3.5 years!
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I'm not so sure. When, as currently, that wealth is generated based on the losses of speculators, the conned, or simply poorly informed, then I'd class Bankman-Fried into the robber-baron class who sought to cement their legacies with philanthropic endeavors instead of their ruthless practices. The means by which they accumulate their wealth are the lens through which we should view their "good works".
    - exdsq 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure - he was donating 50% of his salary at Jane Street prior to starting his current crypto endeavors and has pledged to donate basically everything over the next few years, of which he's already started. Initially staff at his companies had to donate regularly, 1% of fees from his companies are donated, and he advocates others in the space to do the same. The guy basically lives in his office eating fried veg and rice playing League of Legends in his downtime. That money is being made for charities and predominantly comes by enabling trading, which I don't believe is ethically wrong (his general good, in a utilitarian sense, is definitely higher than any qualms one might have against crypto anyway).

manigandham 5y ago

Average laptops are many times more powerful than a Raspberry Pi, and distributed computing with proof-of-work means nodes can contribute as much power as they have/want; no arbitrary design limits are needed. Also the comparison was instructions-per-second between Ethereum's network and a raw CPU. Of course this trade-off in speed comes at the gain of decentralization and other features, however it remains to be seen whether that has really provided any net benefit overall.

smoldesu 5y ago
Yeah, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You're correct in that we have yet to see if there are any tangible benefits from a "social computer" as it were, and comparing Ethereum to any computer is like comparing a tree to an apple. They're fundamentally different things that exist to solve fundamentally different problems. The "interesting" part of it comes from how we can benefit from small-scale, distributed computing in the long run. The fields history isn't very promising (NFTs had a lot of potential from a logistics standpoint; all we got were lousy thousand-dollar apes), but if people are able to align their incentives properly then I can still see a way forward for smart contracts. The issue is that there is an infinitesimally small chance that we will be able to agree on what it should be used for, and it's likely to languish in the same stupidity/scam hell that other crypto projects have fallen into. We'll either make a revolutionary step forward in trustless computing, or receive a rather expensive lesson about how cool technology does not a desirable product make.

magicjosh 5y ago

> So I still need a DNS name False. You can use Ethereum Name Service. ENS is an on-chain version of DNS that is not controlled by a centralized gatekeeper. >I still need a server, I still need storage False. You can use IPFS and Filecoin to store and serve files not controlled by a centralized gatekeeper. That all said, this article is embarrassing. If you want a some critical ideas of web3, read Moxie's piece: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

gaadd33 5y ago
I don't know anything about ENS and was wondering does it work if DNS is down or unavailable in your location?
- magicjosh 5y ago
  I'm curious about this as well. Here's my simple mental model. DNS lives on the core DNS servers and is replicated elsewhere. DNS being "down" would mean that the core DNS servers were taken down. ENS [1] lives on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS being "down" would mean that Ethereum itself was down. ENS names (.eth) resolve to address hashes on the Ethereum blockchain. So to answer your question, they are parallel systems, so one going down doesn't affect the other. However, the thing I'm wondering is if DNS goes down, does it take ENS with it? I'm not sure how the whole ".eth" part works, is that on DNS. [1] https://docs.ens.domains/ https://docs.ens.domains/
  - gaadd33 5y ago
    Or even as simple as you don't have a working local resolver. But yeah, that's my basic question, is ethereum (and by extension ENS) dependent on DNS or could you run it all without any problems?
jagger27 5y ago
Why would anyone want to spend deflationary currency renting an ENS domain today when no one outside the echo chamber space cares about them and DNS is ~10x cheaper? The gas fees alone are brutal.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Well, I'm more than happy to overcomplicate an architecture if it will make me a millionaire. If I had a better audience and contacts I'd certainly do a shitcoin and retire.

civilized 5y ago

You didn't really show anything intellectually dishonest about the article. You just made a contradictory claim with no evidence. And I'm not sure how "crypto is inefficient and slow" is contradicted by "it's inefficient and slow by design".

lekevicius 5y ago
Yes, sorry about that. I really wanted to find one conference talk that went into a lot of details about picking gas limit and why (sync catching up, etc), but after googling for a couple of minutes, couldn’t find it.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  If a strong explanation is difficult to find by a proponent of crypto already familiar with the issues then Ethereum, Web3, and crypto in general have a serious communications issue.
  - lekevicius 5y ago
    No disagreement on this point: everything is so decentralized, with very limited “official” content, that providing “authoritative” resources is quite difficult. That talk wasn’t even in Devcon, if I remember correctly.

codeflo 5y ago

It’s true that these limitations are known to the in-crowd, and also to everyone with some CS knowledge that bothered to understand a bit about the technical details. But pro-crypto articles/posts/tweets usually fail to mention any of that, or hand-wave it away with an incorrect reference to Moore’s law. “World computer” is a specific phrase I’ve seen many times referencing Ethereum, and I personally find comparisons with the Raspberry Pi a very effective way to contextualize that. As a consequence of all the selective information going around, some people are drawn into crypto that don’t really understand the limits of the technology’s capabilities. It’s important for the protection of those people to explain, in detail but in plain English, the gap between hype and reality.

inlined 5y ago

They persist because there’s a lot of skeptics who only see the harms that crypto causes: making money laundering trivial with tumblers, making a safe haven for criminal activity by bypassing kYC laws, deriving much of its value from speculators who have no intention to actually use it as a currency, screwing over these customers with market manipulation that is illegal in most markets, making goods like graphics cards impossible to buy, putting a floor on the price of energy to be whatever can be mined, and contributing to global warming by spending the energy of a country on a silly number of transactions. But if you have a good article on why web3 is good For all parties involved, I will read that too.

DennisP 5y ago
Your last three points will be solved on Ethereum by proof of stake. It's been in the works for a long time, but now the proof of stake network has been running in production for over a year, with $30 billion in ETH deposited. It's running in parallel to the main network, which is still mining, but the code to merge the networks is running on a public testnet. All their previous upgrades have gone live within a year of their public testnets.
- inlined 5y ago
  How many joules per transaction is the proof of stake network? How many tps can it perform?
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Based on observations, it looks like the proof of stake network will drop Ethereum's energy usage by about 99.95%. https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ It can do this because it doesn't rely on any sort of "work." It's just another internet protocol. Proof of stake doesn't have anything to do with tps, so that won't change significantly. The solutions to that are rollups (second layers that inherit the full security of the main chain) and sharding (which multiplies the capacity of rollups). Some rollup systems are in production today, capable of a couple thousand tps. According to the most recent plan I saw, sharding would multiply that by twenty, initially.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ineedasername 5y ago

Saying it's slow on purpose does not address the author's criticism unless you elaborate by explaining why that was the design decision and how the tradeoff is better than the author's alternative.

magicjosh 5y ago

Re: cheap shots at web3 and crypto regularly rising on HN? I started a thread here to collect well-aimed shots at web3 and crypto: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30132617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30132617

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

8note 5y ago

The why is that they introduced a ton of problems by choosing a bad model to implement their systems. Their problems would go away if they switched to a tool built for the job instead of using crypto. It's fun building around a fundental design flaw, but it's only for toy projects

tialaramex 5y ago

> They rarely present any new insights. I feel like pretty often there's a new "crypto" toy, claiming that this time it's all different, this isn't a scam, and we need to stop talking about whatever was hot last week and grasp that this latest thing is definitely the future. We get plenty of those on HN too. So you'd expect a counter-balancing flow of cynicism, and yeah, it's not going to have a lot of new insight because scams are more the same than they are different. If you fell for a pyramid scheme where you're supposedly involved in property investment, and then years later fell for a different pyramid scheme where you're supposedly selling nutritional supplements based on organic fruits, you might feel like these are completely different business, why are the posts saying "This is a pyramid scheme" just reciting the same things each time when the property investment and the fruit pills were so different? Well because that's just window dressing, it didn't matter, the essence of the pyramid scheme was the incentive structure, the fact that, honestly, you couldn't make money from the actual "business" only from the pyramid. How the "business" supposedly worked was irrelevant.

analognoise 5y ago

"WHY do these supposedly smart engineers make decisions I don’t get?" There's a quote: engineers can do for $1 what any fool can do for $2 (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1009994-an-engineer-can-do-for-a-dollar-what-any-fool https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1009994-an-engineer-can-do-...) So an engineer that made a system that was 1/5000 the speed and thousands of times the cost of a $45 computer wouldn't be a smart engineer. They'd be history's shittiest engineer ever. Web3 people aren't good engineers. At all.