3 ms·

Key phrase in the article: "I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker" I'll spare you the time: he's either wilfully or intentionally misinformed, f

Key phrase in the article: "I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker" I'll spare you the time: he's either wilfully or intentionally misinformed, far too many errors to count. Utterly unaware of any scaling solutions, and stuck on the "zomg carbon footprint" FUD, unable to utter the word "nuclear". This is despite the common knowledge that today good chunk of hashrate being produced by renewables in the US and nuclear in Russia. Quotes unreliable sources that have a stated agenda and apparent conflicts of interest. Outdated, inaccurate, sloppy.

PhileinSophia 5y ago
thematrixturtle 5y ago
I'll bite, would you care to list three of those "far too many" errors?
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  1. not a single mention of any scaling solutions whatsoever. 2. "zomg carbon footprint" - apparently renewables can't properly supply enough to power a tiny country size of Portugal or Netherlands? I thought we are going to power the Earth with renewables? Something seems rather inconsistent here. Of course this Malthusian cannot bring himself to utter the word "nuclear". 3. Mining pools are made up of many individual miners andm depending on the protocol, the lucky hashing units and not the pool, constructs the block, and as such would not be a trusted third party. Something he seems to be blissfully unaware of. Even if the pool constructs the block - hashing units can be pivoted away from a malicious pool in seconds. 4. Banks get hacked and lose money on the regular, it's not unique to DeFi. Insurance for DeFi exists, just it banks purchase fidelity bonds. 5. Not a single mention of censorship resistance at all. This alone should disqualify this immediately, tbh. Reads like something written by a privileged, out of touch person who has never had to face a day of actual hardship in his life, such as: confiscation of wealth, destruction of savings by inflation, personal bankruptcy due to sovereign default, or even outright denial of access to banking for the politically suppressed minorities.
  - thematrixturtle 5y ago
    1. For scaling, the burden of proof lies on Lightning Network/ETH2/whatever they're calling them today to demonstrate that they can scale (how many years has it been now?), and he demolishes two widely proposed alternatives to PoW, namely proof of storage and proof of stake. 2. This is a rant, not an error. 3. I'm not sure what you're arguing here? His argument is that in practice, a tiny cartel of mining pools exerts central control over most cryptos, meaning they're not really decentralized at all. 4. There are a) way, way, way more DeFi hacks and exploits than TradFi ones, and b) consumers don't get wiped out when a bank gets robbed or hacked. 5. Omission != error 6. Ad hominem.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      1. burden is on those claiming expertise. 2. being luddite in 2022 is a grave error. 3. he's absolutely dead wrong. pools do not exercise central control which has been observed empirically numerous times. 4. Card industry alone loses $40B per year. That's just cards. Lending and wealth is a whole other universe. So make it roughly 1-2T per year, which is the entire crypto marketcap lost every year by tradfi, roughly 10x than DeFi. F. GG. 5. omission of the most key topic at hand, isn't a simple error, it's proof of ignorance. 6. ad hom, but by you. (since when is it an ad hom to call someone wealthy and successful to the point they are immune to vagaries of daily life in most locales on Earth? Amazing.)
      - derac 5y ago
        Can I see some sources for (4) and your claim that his sources are biased?
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        timeon 5y ago
        It seems that in the end the one spreading the 'FUD' is you.
sho_hn 5y ago
> despite good chunk of hashrate being produced by renewables The article directly and elaborately addresses this point, advancing the argument that renewables are scarce vis-a-vis our urgent need for them and this isn't the best thing to use them on. Your attempt at summary is selective; I'm glad I read the piece instead.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  There isn't a single mention of "nuclear" in the article, written by a Malthusian. His estimation of how much energy is "per transaction" is flawed, due to complete disregard of available scaling solutions today. He essentially equates a central bank transaction to a penny left in a tipping jar, that's the general standard of rigour in this article.
  - timeon 5y ago
    Nuclear is not magic you need to build them first which takes time. And as article has pointed out we need to act now. So crypto is adding the problem, not solving it.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      The so-called environmentalists, who are simply the modern day malthusian luddites, insisting nuclear is bad is what needs solving. Bitcoin just demonstrated renewable energy cannot scale in practice. If only 1% of the electricity demand cannot be sustainably and economically be supplied by renewables, some serious re-thinking about strategy is in order.
Daishiman 5y ago
You remind me _exactly_ of what it like being a Linux advocate in the early 2000s when, sure, you could have WiFi, automounting media, and play videogames... if you were willing to into week-long yak shaving expeditions recompiling your kernel with various flags, checking out experimental kernel branches, playing around with WPASupplicant, etc, just to be the only one, just for your stack to break next week with the next round of updates to the userland software. Yes, it's fascinating to know that there's proof-of-stake. It's interesting to know there's a dozen improvements technologies in the pipeline to fix these issues. It's also curious that these technologies have been in said pipeline for a good half of a decade by now, with many barriers being political within miner group rather than technological, and with the number of BTC advocates showing actual concerns for these issues to be essentially nonexistent, drowned out by the voices of scammers and grifters.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jakupovic 5y ago
  Thank you for the wifi + Linux analogy, which I lived through and enjoyed. If we didn't do any of the work then would we be happy with windows or macos 8.0? It's amazing the echo chamber that is HN on topic of crypto, bad bad just burn it. Completely not what I expect from hackers.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    There is something to be said about time and place. The early internet was a unique time and place. Crypto reminds me of that today, and really the only place that does.
  - blueboo 5y ago
    We gave it a shot until the scale and audacity of the grift so obviously dwarfed the practical use that it humiliates its depressingly unaware boosters.
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
> Outdated, inaccurate, sloppy. Just read the article. It’s very well sourced and addresses e.g. renewables. I encourage people to look at it instead of relying on this comment to make a judgment call.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  It quotes sources who have admitted to lie to advance their agenda. Carefully writing out reference to known bad faith actors isn't well sourced, it's misinformation.
  - johnofthesea 5y ago
    Do you have proof?
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      - johnofthesea 5y ago
        > It quotes sources who have admitted to lie to advance their agenda. I mean just where did they admitted it? I am asking in good faith.
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        One of the sources on energy consumption per transaction has been written by an analyst who has admitted in interviews to knowingly misrepresent the data by structuring it in a certain way. I’m not gonna dig up references now. “kWh per txn” is bunk and DR is either aware of that and deceived you knowingly or is unfit to give lectures at this point, but does it anyway. Another is a 2018 paper on “mining very bad mmkay” from an author who lunched his own proof of stake coin and now has undeclared conflicts of interest measured in billions. Presented as an impartial credible source. The entire “lecture” just appears to be an ideology piece for those that enjoy Malthusian doom porn. Which is fine, I guess, if you go to a Jesuit academy instead of Stanford.
MattPalmer1086 5y ago
1. He created successful decentralised systems working on low power cheap devices long before Bitcoin was a thing (see LOCKSS). 2. He's been writing about these things for a long time. 3. He repurposed a talk he'd already written at short notice, so is apologizing that it wasn't created specifically for that course. 4. He's talking about how crypto currencies are now and in the past, not some imagined future where all the problems have been solved by something else. So, up to date, accurate, well researched!
- georgia_peach 5y ago
  LOCKSS may replicate between nodes, but it is neither anonymous nor permissionless, and is child's play compared to the problems the major cryptos are trying to solve.
  - timeon 5y ago
    > trying to solve For now they are mostly selling the dream.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Easiest sale in the world.
  - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
    I'm just pointing out that he has fielded successful decentralised, censorship-resistant systems in the past. So he knows a bit about this space. But I agree, it is solving a different problem. To nit-pick a little, almost all crypto currencies aren't anonymous. At best they are pseudonymous.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Are you at Stanford? Is it really that common for lecturers at supposedly decent universities to blatantly push their ideology in what's meant to be academic education? He just can't help but keep repeating the word carbon carbon carbon carbon e-waste carbon carbon, but is seemingly unable to utter the forbidden 'nuclear' word at all. Could be a California thing, I suppose. They seem to prefer rolling blackouts to advancing technology for mundane everyday things like energy, as it appears. Another, totally unbiased and very academic reference is to a blog named: LAWFARE, specifically an article: "How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission". Absolutely no agenda here, nuh-uh. He then proceeds to cite a 2018 paper on decentralization of mining, from IC3, which is headed by Professor Gun, as a supposedly credible source on bitcoin and ethereum mining. Professor Gun launched his own coin around the same time the cited paper was published, and at the current market rates his conflict of interest is measured in single digit billions at the very least. Good for him, but does not make for an impartial research reference, would you cite Peabody Energy on benefits of coal, do you expect them to say it's terrible? This lecture is simply just DR peddling carbon alarmist dogma and malthusian doom porn for your consumption. You've literally just read an ideology piece with references conflicted in billions and you believe it's accurate and well researched. If this is what passes for expensive "education" at a high-ranked university in the US, many more things I found rather puzzling about that country are immediately clear.
timeon 5y ago
> stuck on the "zomg carbon footprint" Yes Bitcoin is stuck on carbon footprint, no need to ad meme keywords in between. > Quotes unreliable sources While you have presented 0 sources only wishful thinking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

PhileinSophia 5y ago

thematrixturtle 5y ago

I'll bite, would you care to list three of those "far too many" errors?

inter_netuser 5y ago
1. not a single mention of any scaling solutions whatsoever. 2. "zomg carbon footprint" - apparently renewables can't properly supply enough to power a tiny country size of Portugal or Netherlands? I thought we are going to power the Earth with renewables? Something seems rather inconsistent here. Of course this Malthusian cannot bring himself to utter the word "nuclear". 3. Mining pools are made up of many individual miners andm depending on the protocol, the lucky hashing units and not the pool, constructs the block, and as such would not be a trusted third party. Something he seems to be blissfully unaware of. Even if the pool constructs the block - hashing units can be pivoted away from a malicious pool in seconds. 4. Banks get hacked and lose money on the regular, it's not unique to DeFi. Insurance for DeFi exists, just it banks purchase fidelity bonds. 5. Not a single mention of censorship resistance at all. This alone should disqualify this immediately, tbh. Reads like something written by a privileged, out of touch person who has never had to face a day of actual hardship in his life, such as: confiscation of wealth, destruction of savings by inflation, personal bankruptcy due to sovereign default, or even outright denial of access to banking for the politically suppressed minorities.
- thematrixturtle 5y ago
  1. For scaling, the burden of proof lies on Lightning Network/ETH2/whatever they're calling them today to demonstrate that they can scale (how many years has it been now?), and he demolishes two widely proposed alternatives to PoW, namely proof of storage and proof of stake. 2. This is a rant, not an error. 3. I'm not sure what you're arguing here? His argument is that in practice, a tiny cartel of mining pools exerts central control over most cryptos, meaning they're not really decentralized at all. 4. There are a) way, way, way more DeFi hacks and exploits than TradFi ones, and b) consumers don't get wiped out when a bank gets robbed or hacked. 5. Omission != error 6. Ad hominem.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    1. burden is on those claiming expertise. 2. being luddite in 2022 is a grave error. 3. he's absolutely dead wrong. pools do not exercise central control which has been observed empirically numerous times. 4. Card industry alone loses $40B per year. That's just cards. Lending and wealth is a whole other universe. So make it roughly 1-2T per year, which is the entire crypto marketcap lost every year by tradfi, roughly 10x than DeFi. F. GG. 5. omission of the most key topic at hand, isn't a simple error, it's proof of ignorance. 6. ad hom, but by you. (since when is it an ad hom to call someone wealthy and successful to the point they are immune to vagaries of daily life in most locales on Earth? Amazing.)
    - derac 5y ago
      Can I see some sources for (4) and your claim that his sources are biased?
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        timeon 5y ago
        It seems that in the end the one spreading the 'FUD' is you.

sho_hn 5y ago

> despite good chunk of hashrate being produced by renewables The article directly and elaborately addresses this point, advancing the argument that renewables are scarce vis-a-vis our urgent need for them and this isn't the best thing to use them on. Your attempt at summary is selective; I'm glad I read the piece instead.

inter_netuser 5y ago
There isn't a single mention of "nuclear" in the article, written by a Malthusian. His estimation of how much energy is "per transaction" is flawed, due to complete disregard of available scaling solutions today. He essentially equates a central bank transaction to a penny left in a tipping jar, that's the general standard of rigour in this article.
- timeon 5y ago
  Nuclear is not magic you need to build them first which takes time. And as article has pointed out we need to act now. So crypto is adding the problem, not solving it.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    The so-called environmentalists, who are simply the modern day malthusian luddites, insisting nuclear is bad is what needs solving. Bitcoin just demonstrated renewable energy cannot scale in practice. If only 1% of the electricity demand cannot be sustainably and economically be supplied by renewables, some serious re-thinking about strategy is in order.

Daishiman 5y ago

You remind me _exactly_ of what it like being a Linux advocate in the early 2000s when, sure, you could have WiFi, automounting media, and play videogames... if you were willing to into week-long yak shaving expeditions recompiling your kernel with various flags, checking out experimental kernel branches, playing around with WPASupplicant, etc, just to be the only one, just for your stack to break next week with the next round of updates to the userland software. Yes, it's fascinating to know that there's proof-of-stake. It's interesting to know there's a dozen improvements technologies in the pipeline to fix these issues. It's also curious that these technologies have been in said pipeline for a good half of a decade by now, with many barriers being political within miner group rather than technological, and with the number of BTC advocates showing actual concerns for these issues to be essentially nonexistent, drowned out by the voices of scammers and grifters.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jakupovic 5y ago
Thank you for the wifi + Linux analogy, which I lived through and enjoyed. If we didn't do any of the work then would we be happy with windows or macos 8.0? It's amazing the echo chamber that is HN on topic of crypto, bad bad just burn it. Completely not what I expect from hackers.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  There is something to be said about time and place. The early internet was a unique time and place. Crypto reminds me of that today, and really the only place that does.
- blueboo 5y ago
  We gave it a shot until the scale and audacity of the grift so obviously dwarfed the practical use that it humiliates its depressingly unaware boosters.

_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago

> Outdated, inaccurate, sloppy. Just read the article. It’s very well sourced and addresses e.g. renewables. I encourage people to look at it instead of relying on this comment to make a judgment call.

inter_netuser 5y ago
It quotes sources who have admitted to lie to advance their agenda. Carefully writing out reference to known bad faith actors isn't well sourced, it's misinformation.
- johnofthesea 5y ago
  Do you have proof?
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    - johnofthesea 5y ago
      > It quotes sources who have admitted to lie to advance their agenda. I mean just where did they admitted it? I am asking in good faith.
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        One of the sources on energy consumption per transaction has been written by an analyst who has admitted in interviews to knowingly misrepresent the data by structuring it in a certain way. I’m not gonna dig up references now. “kWh per txn” is bunk and DR is either aware of that and deceived you knowingly or is unfit to give lectures at this point, but does it anyway. Another is a 2018 paper on “mining very bad mmkay” from an author who lunched his own proof of stake coin and now has undeclared conflicts of interest measured in billions. Presented as an impartial credible source. The entire “lecture” just appears to be an ideology piece for those that enjoy Malthusian doom porn. Which is fine, I guess, if you go to a Jesuit academy instead of Stanford.

MattPalmer1086 5y ago

1. He created successful decentralised systems working on low power cheap devices long before Bitcoin was a thing (see LOCKSS). 2. He's been writing about these things for a long time. 3. He repurposed a talk he'd already written at short notice, so is apologizing that it wasn't created specifically for that course. 4. He's talking about how crypto currencies are now and in the past, not some imagined future where all the problems have been solved by something else. So, up to date, accurate, well researched!

georgia_peach 5y ago
LOCKSS may replicate between nodes, but it is neither anonymous nor permissionless, and is child's play compared to the problems the major cryptos are trying to solve.
- timeon 5y ago
  > trying to solve For now they are mostly selling the dream.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Easiest sale in the world.
- MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  I'm just pointing out that he has fielded successful decentralised, censorship-resistant systems in the past. So he knows a bit about this space. But I agree, it is solving a different problem. To nit-pick a little, almost all crypto currencies aren't anonymous. At best they are pseudonymous.
inter_netuser 5y ago
Are you at Stanford? Is it really that common for lecturers at supposedly decent universities to blatantly push their ideology in what's meant to be academic education? He just can't help but keep repeating the word carbon carbon carbon carbon e-waste carbon carbon, but is seemingly unable to utter the forbidden 'nuclear' word at all. Could be a California thing, I suppose. They seem to prefer rolling blackouts to advancing technology for mundane everyday things like energy, as it appears. Another, totally unbiased and very academic reference is to a blog named: LAWFARE, specifically an article: "How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission". Absolutely no agenda here, nuh-uh. He then proceeds to cite a 2018 paper on decentralization of mining, from IC3, which is headed by Professor Gun, as a supposedly credible source on bitcoin and ethereum mining. Professor Gun launched his own coin around the same time the cited paper was published, and at the current market rates his conflict of interest is measured in single digit billions at the very least. Good for him, but does not make for an impartial research reference, would you cite Peabody Energy on benefits of coal, do you expect them to say it's terrible? This lecture is simply just DR peddling carbon alarmist dogma and malthusian doom porn for your consumption. You've literally just read an ideology piece with references conflicted in billions and you believe it's accurate and well researched. If this is what passes for expensive "education" at a high-ranked university in the US, many more things I found rather puzzling about that country are immediately clear.

timeon 5y ago

> stuck on the "zomg carbon footprint" Yes Bitcoin is stuck on carbon footprint, no need to ad meme keywords in between. > Quotes unreliable sources While you have presented 0 sources only wishful thinking.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]