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I think you're overstating the relative importance and influence of Forbes. As a side note, I like Binance Smart Chain. It's an EVM compliant alternative to Et

by bko 5y ago

I think you're overstating the relative importance and influence of Forbes. As a side note, I like Binance Smart Chain. It's an EVM compliant alternative to Ethereum except with proof of stake and much lower fees. It costs about $0.12 to call a smart contract. To someone like me who is interested in the technology of smart contracts and doesn't want to pay $40 to interact with a contract, this is a dream come true.

magicjosh 5y ago
I was curious about the importance of Forbes. It's been linked over 1,000 times on Hacker News: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Forbes https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Forbes
steelstraw 5y ago
It is nicer to use in that respect, but isn't it really just a copy of Ethereum with less security?
arcticbull 5y ago
> As a side note, I like Binance Smart Chain. It's an EVM compliant alternative to Ethereum except with proof of stake and much lower fees. It costs about $0.12 to call a smart contract. To someone like me who is interested in the technology of smart contracts and doesn't want to pay $40 to interact with a contract, this is a dream come true. Right, it's a centralized clone of ethereum operated by Binance. If you're ok with centralization just fire up an EC2 instance. The free tier includes 750 hours per month.
- bko 5y ago
  I don't think hosting your own node allows you to interact with contracts for free. I can (and have) played on the devnet, but you're limited there to interacting with contracts hosted on devnet. Can you elaborate what you mean?
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    My point was rather that if you're ok with centralization, ok without censorship resistance, and ok without meaningful absolute reliability guarantees - all of which is true on BSC - and you value low cost and low latency, what on earth are you doing using a blockchain? At $0.12 per execution that's one heck of an expensive AWS Lambda function, which are normally priced at $0.0000002 each and $0.0000133334 per GB-second of execution on ARM. Lambda is about 625,000 times cheaper per request than BSC while offering the same-or-dramatically-better guarantees. [1] [edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is regulatory arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift, regulatory arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of blockchain. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
    - bko 5y ago
      I'm interested in finance and analytics. So I like to monitor and occasionally write bots to trade crypto currencies on decentralized exchanges in a real world environment. Could I do algo trading without blockchain? I guess but the transparency and tooling of EVM is unmatched, and I don't know the tax and legal consequences of doing it in proper exchanges. Blockchain is the wild west and for someone who is curious and likes to tinker, it's the environment I prefer. What's the self-hosted lambda alternative for what I want to do? > [edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is regulatory arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift, regulatory arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of blockchain. Can we stop with the moral panic? If I live in a state where its a crime to gamble (except for heavily advertised state run lottery that targets poor people), and I am of sound body and mind and want to legally gamble and learn something about probability, psychology and technology in the meantime, why is this a bad thing? Give me a break
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        No moral panic here, I've got nothing against gambling. I love to gamble. However, crypto is clearly utilized in this case for the trading of unregistered securities via regulatory arbitrage. That's just fact. Good luck out there, and I hope you win! You'll need it, though, it is after all a mob casino you're gambling in. This is the classic "I know it's a crooked casino but it's the only game in town" argument. The big issue there is you can't know the odds because the house is playing against you and they can see your hand and they can and do frequently turn the lights off if things start to move against them. This is of course why we register securities and regulate brokerages. I'm pretty confident we'll recapitulate that in due time.
vasco 5y ago
If you're willing to pay the centralisation price and you're just interested in the technology, you have better options - where at least if there's regulatory issues they haven't come up yet that I know off - with chains like Solana.
- bko 5y ago
  I tried Solana and it wasn't nearly as open. Most contracts are closed source and even if you did get the source its difficult to confirm its correct due to a more complicated build process. And the devs don't really care that its closed. I wrote my thoughts about Solana block chain. I would love some other recommendations though. So far I found Binance Smart Chain to be the most open and easy to navigate. https://mleverything.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-solana-blockchain https://mleverything.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-solana-b...
Bayart 5y ago
There are other cheap-to-deploy-on EVM-compatible (I feel like I'm talking about the IBM PC days) blockchains out there that aren't wholly owned by an exchange. Avalanche, Polygon etc.

by bko 5y ago

magicjosh 5y ago

I was curious about the importance of Forbes. It's been linked over 1,000 times on Hacker News: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Forbes https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Forbes

steelstraw 5y ago

It is nicer to use in that respect, but isn't it really just a copy of Ethereum with less security?

arcticbull 5y ago

> As a side note, I like Binance Smart Chain. It's an EVM compliant alternative to Ethereum except with proof of stake and much lower fees. It costs about $0.12 to call a smart contract. To someone like me who is interested in the technology of smart contracts and doesn't want to pay $40 to interact with a contract, this is a dream come true. Right, it's a centralized clone of ethereum operated by Binance. If you're ok with centralization just fire up an EC2 instance. The free tier includes 750 hours per month.

bko 5y ago
I don't think hosting your own node allows you to interact with contracts for free. I can (and have) played on the devnet, but you're limited there to interacting with contracts hosted on devnet. Can you elaborate what you mean?
- arcticbull 5y ago
  My point was rather that if you're ok with centralization, ok without censorship resistance, and ok without meaningful absolute reliability guarantees - all of which is true on BSC - and you value low cost and low latency, what on earth are you doing using a blockchain? At $0.12 per execution that's one heck of an expensive AWS Lambda function, which are normally priced at $0.0000002 each and $0.0000133334 per GB-second of execution on ARM. Lambda is about 625,000 times cheaper per request than BSC while offering the same-or-dramatically-better guarantees. [1] [edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is regulatory arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift, regulatory arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of blockchain. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
  - bko 5y ago
    I'm interested in finance and analytics. So I like to monitor and occasionally write bots to trade crypto currencies on decentralized exchanges in a real world environment. Could I do algo trading without blockchain? I guess but the transparency and tooling of EVM is unmatched, and I don't know the tax and legal consequences of doing it in proper exchanges. Blockchain is the wild west and for someone who is curious and likes to tinker, it's the environment I prefer. What's the self-hosted lambda alternative for what I want to do? > [edit] Ah, I see the answer to my question is regulatory arbitrage. Gotcha. Along with crime and grift, regulatory arbitrage is one of the three big pillars of blockchain. Can we stop with the moral panic? If I live in a state where its a crime to gamble (except for heavily advertised state run lottery that targets poor people), and I am of sound body and mind and want to legally gamble and learn something about probability, psychology and technology in the meantime, why is this a bad thing? Give me a break
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      No moral panic here, I've got nothing against gambling. I love to gamble. However, crypto is clearly utilized in this case for the trading of unregistered securities via regulatory arbitrage. That's just fact. Good luck out there, and I hope you win! You'll need it, though, it is after all a mob casino you're gambling in. This is the classic "I know it's a crooked casino but it's the only game in town" argument. The big issue there is you can't know the odds because the house is playing against you and they can see your hand and they can and do frequently turn the lights off if things start to move against them. This is of course why we register securities and regulate brokerages. I'm pretty confident we'll recapitulate that in due time.

vasco 5y ago

If you're willing to pay the centralisation price and you're just interested in the technology, you have better options - where at least if there's regulatory issues they haven't come up yet that I know off - with chains like Solana.

bko 5y ago
I tried Solana and it wasn't nearly as open. Most contracts are closed source and even if you did get the source its difficult to confirm its correct due to a more complicated build process. And the devs don't really care that its closed. I wrote my thoughts about Solana block chain. I would love some other recommendations though. So far I found Binance Smart Chain to be the most open and easy to navigate. https://mleverything.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-solana-blockchain https://mleverything.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-solana-b...

Bayart 5y ago

There are other cheap-to-deploy-on EVM-compatible (I feel like I'm talking about the IBM PC days) blockchains out there that aren't wholly owned by an exchange. Avalanche, Polygon etc.