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Vitalik Buterin is worried about crypto's future

106 points by hdk 5y ago

Tenoke 5y ago
That's such odd (and against the rules) title editorializing that I had to click to confirm what's going on. Edit: and now the title has been re-editorialized a second time even though the original one isn't misleading.
mwattsun 5y ago
- throwaway568 5y ago
  "single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi" As true as a legislature can be described as a pen + notebook - there is value in consensus.
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    I love pen and paper but I just took a look at the Build Back Better bill and it's almost 2500 pages with I'm guessing thousands of edits by hundreds of parties. Pen and paper wouldn't be my first choice for this task https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5376/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5376...
- yannoninator 5y ago
  Yes. And most (I would even count all) of the biggest cryptocurrencies use-cases are entirely wasteful.
- beecafe 5y ago
  More or less, with the addition that many people are running the computer in near lockstep allowing a consensus on the true global state of such a computer and so for its execution to be trusted.
- WJW 5y ago
  It's not wrong. It's also a very slow immutable but globally accessible database that's more or less free to read but every write query costs money.
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    So essentially you may have thousands of computers trying to write to the same file at the same time so you implement a consensus mechanism to determine the final write, something like an n-way diff
- benjaminwootton 5y ago
  Gas fees are about incentivising people to take part and disincentivising bad behaviour. If you wanted to calculate pi obviously you wouldn’t do so on Ethereum. If you wanted a globally distributed ledger then you need something like gas fees in place.
  - zucker42 5y ago
    No one wants a globally distributed ledger. They want to send money from one person to another. Or, to use the example that motivated Vitalik, they want a record of the items they own in a video game. A globally distributed ledger is simply a tool to accomplish that. As long as Ethereum represents a "single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi" (despite the fact that it utilizes an enormous amount of real computers), it is utterly incapable of solving those problems at any sort of scale. Take Augur, for example. A prediction market without a trusted resolver seems pretty useful, but the fact that a blockchain can't handle any real world application on-chain meant that it was unusable. Another example is that it's ridiculous on its face that CryptoKitties was able to bring Ethereum to its knees. People want to base real financial markets on this tech when a trading card game is able to congest the network and increase fees 10-fold?
- delusional 5y ago
  That's a fun analogy, but you're leaving out some stuff. For one, the virtual computer consumes 112.65TWh of power every year[1]. Importantly, the "gas" fees can only be paid in a special monopoly currency which you have to buy from a speculative market. IIRC you also have to pay for memory usage. [1]: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    That's almost 0.5% of all energy in the world. Are any other blockchains using close to as much energy as BTC and ETH?!?
  - rafale 5y ago
    Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake this year. The environment argument is soon to become a non-issue.
    - shafyy 5y ago
      Ethereum has been moving to proof-of-stake this year for 5 years now. Will it happen some day? Probably. But we don't know how PoS will go for ETH once it has moved. Besides, there are many other negative exernalities that the move to PoS won't get rid of.
      - hunterb123 5y ago
        > Will it happen some day? It doesn't happen all at once, it's a transition. There are billions staked in ETH2 already. > But we don't know how PoS will go for ETH once it has moved. There's quite a few PoS coins that are working well, Algorand comes to mind. > Besides, there are many other negative exernalities that the move to PoS won't get rid of. Such as?
        shafyy 5y ago
        > Such as? Enabling fraud, enabling ransomware, enabling authoritarian dictators to enrich themselves. Furthermore there's still Bitcoin that will never move to PoS, and the popularity of ETH also swaps over to Bitcoin and other cryptos. Yes, yes, there are also scams in fiat money blabla. The problem here is, that cryptos are a strictly zero-sum game and don't add any value to anybody except people who are able to dump their coins to the next greater fool. So why should we accept all these disproportionate externalities?
- k__ 5y ago
  I had this impression too when I started reading about Ethereum. I think, the mismatch is, while Ethereum is being sold as "the world computer" and being Turing complete, it's actually more narrow in scope, because if the points you just mentioned. It's more of a decentralized and permissionless clearinghouse. If you need storage, you wouldn't use Ethereum but IPFS/Filecoin, Skynet/Sia, or Arweave. For compute, you would use Akashnet (albeit a bad example here, but I don't know something better right now). I don't know if there are plans to integrate features from other chains into Ethereum, to make it more general purpose, or if that's even possible. But right now multi-chain is where things are heading.
  - pram 5y ago
    Like using AWS, but worse in every imaginable way!
    - md2020 5y ago
      AWS isn’t permissionless and decentralized, so no, it’s not at all like that. Stop with the snark.
    - k__ 5y ago
      In many ways, I would say. If censor resitance and knowing who actually paid for a service are seen as valuable to enough people, it could have a future.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jasode 5y ago
  >Ethereum is a single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi that is available to anyone with access to an internet All analogies are incomplete and imperfect but I'd say a more accurate mental model would be something like this: Ethereum is like a global database _with_ stored procedures. With this analogy, the database component would map to the blockchain : https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data_size https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data... The stored procedure language would map to the Ethereum programming language Solidity. Computers worldwide run stored procedures to decide how to write the next block(s) in the database. (Consensus.) Embedded in the above is the collective psychology and incentives that attract humans to do the above activity. (aka Proof-of-Work). To see how simple explanations of Ethereum can leave out the mass psychology aspect, consider another example of an incomplete analogy: The Reddit Place experiment of 2017 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_(Reddit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_(Reddit) ) video of the pixels evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY We could say that Reddit Place 1000x1000 art canvas is a worldwide "Adobe Photoshop" that runs slower than a 1990s 486 computer ... which is sort of true... but doesn't really explain the whole phenomenon.
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    Reddit Place is really cool. Place, Hacker News, Reddit and other sites are like global Ouija boards that indicate what is currently interesting to the community mind. Wikipedia reflects what the community thinks is true about a particular subject. The item is fuzzy when it first comes to the attention of global mind but then gradually comes into focus. Hacker News and Wikipedia are not any better if we add more computing power. Ethereum is not like that. It requires bit accuracy since it deals with money and contracts. Ethereum would be have a lot more utility with more computing power.
- thesausageking 5y ago
  No. You're being snarky and leaving out the main point of crypto: trust and coordination. Ethereum is the first shared computer that you can execute code with someone who's openly hostile towards you and guarantee that the code will execute and perform what it was written to do. Think of it more like the patent system. A patent is just a publicly available description of your invention. You could write it up yourself and publish it to a website for $5 / mo, so why would you pay the >$10k it costs to work with a lawyer and file a patent? It's not the description of the invention itself you're paying for, but the rights you get that make it worth it to file a patent. In Ethereum, the "lawyers" and "patent examiners" are the other nodes in the network and the miners which enforce that the smart contract code ran as it was suppose to and can't be undone.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    what if the miners are hostile to you and censor the transaction.
    - Laforet 5y ago
      In that case you are screwed. The odds of every single validator turning against an individual is slim, however Ethereum is not above the act of rewriting history to undo certain transactions. They already did it once with the DAO hack and the market barely moved an eyelid when the supposedily permissonless and irrevocable world computer moves to protect those who are too big to fail.
      - aemreunal 5y ago
        It really doesn't seem slim to me. This article [0] (which was previously discussed on HN [1]) found that "just 0.1 percent of miners (about 50 operations) are responsible for half of all mining output". So it seems like a very real threat to me. I rarely hear anyone pro-crypto talk about this implicit assumption they make about the mining being "sufficiently distributed & diverse". [0]: https://www.techspot.com/news/91937-bitcoin-largely-controlled-small-group-investors-miners-study.html https://www.techspot.com/news/91937-bitcoin-largely-controll... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29008910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29008910
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bigtex88 5y ago
  No. It's a worldwide state machine with permission-less read/write.
- faangiq 5y ago
  Yep!
Existenceblinks 5y ago
One good thing is that at least a mainstream media is getting quite details on what's actually going on despite the ratio of signal/noise is on floor.
TradingPlaces 5y ago
I Am Begging People Not To Use The Machine I Created To Do The Things It Was Created To Do
- twox2 5y ago
  Except that's not the case at all.
  - jbirer 5y ago
    You did not even bother to make an argument on why not, so I will assume you also know he's right but don't want to leave your fanboy ideology.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      The OP was trite snark that didn't deserve a thoughtful response.
    - twox2 5y ago
      My argument is: read the article that was posted.
  - TradingPlaces 5y ago
    How is that not an accurate characterization of the interview? For years, I was unsure if he was a grifter like so many in the space, or just hopelessly naïve about what he was building. This interview settles that on the latter for me.
    - twox2 5y ago
      I guess the question is if you're a glass full or glass empty kind of guy. I interpret a lot of this through a lens of optimism. Generally my read is that he wants to it to be more than bro's flaunting ape pics and wealth, and better of the environment. The rest of it isn't about how he's desperately trying to reign it in, but to offer some vision for interesting applications. Agree that he might have been a bit naive as a young kid building this thing, but I think he's a good thought leader.
hunterb123 5y ago
> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams Expected nothing less from Time...
- Machado117 5y ago
  Why is a modern news publication making such remark when we vilify the same thing when directed at any other group of people?
- InsaneOstrich 5y ago
  It's nice to see truth in journalism every once in awhile
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Everyone has their truth, they should try reporting facts instead of race-baiting for clicks.
    - newswasboring 5y ago
      This is a fact though isn't it? I am anti-crypto for several reasons but even the blind can see that there isn't much diversity in the space.
      - hunterb123 5y ago
        No it's a race-baiting vague assertion with no statistic, study, or source of any kind attached to it.
        newswasboring 5y ago
        In hindi there is a saying "प्रत्यक्ष को प्रमाण की आवश्यकता नहीं होती|" ((bad) translation: The apparent does not require proof"). Look at any of the major figures in crypto, I don't see many "non white guy" people in there. Come on man, not everything requires us to do a study.
dmitriid 5y ago
> powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves It doesn't move that money. It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money. > the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs. Yeah, no. Those products are a) not new, and b) most of them don't require either ethereum in particular or blockchain in general. It's all speculative smoke and mirrors, chasing investor money. > Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong Ah yes. "You're holding it wrong". This is the only outcome of crypto in particular and blockchains in general. > Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects. No, it won't. Because the tech not only doesn't solve these problems, but makes these problems significantly worse [1] > ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world No. The ultimate goal of crypto is exactly to play million-dollar games. Just because it was used to send pretend tokens to desperate people who have no meaningful ways of using them, doesn't mean it's accomplished something meaningful in the world. > The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method Blockchain and efficient in one sentence. > Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up I can't even. And then they talk about how he "couldn't predict this", or "couldn't foresee that", or "watched with horror and dismay" when something easily predictable happened. All the while praising him for being "fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history." Clearly he's "fluent" as in "he can come off as knowledgable in a Twitter thread". See the link below for how all this was clearly predicted. [1] https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
- 0xy 5y ago
  >It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money. If a particular item can be sold at a particular amount with predictable and transparent liquidity it is objectively worth that amount. Ford doesn't speculate a Ford F-150 is worth $30k, they have customers lined up with cash in hand ready to buy and waiting lists (liquidity), therefore they are objectively worth $30k. You wouldn't say 1 share of Amazon stock is speculatively worth $3,205. It's objectively worth that, because there's liquidity and an order book right now that will buy it for that price.
jerojero 5y ago
For a while I have been losing faith in the crypto space, though I've known about it for a really long time I have never really made any significant money in it. But I've been watching it with interest and what interested me the most was the governance aspects of it. But lately, when I look at the space, it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly. I think I am invited everyday on discord or telegram to this or that "DAO", which really are nothing but pump and dump scams with a coat of governance onto them. I do wonder, is this a feature or a bug? Humans might be naturally greedy and maybe these hyper-marketized mechanisms simply bring out the worst in us. But I will say, I really admire Vitalik and his vision, I read his blog and I love it. It makes me hopeful but maybe he might just be too optimistic. Things are not how we'd like them to be but how they are, this is a very important lesson in politics.
- lekevicius 5y ago
  All of these Discord and Telegram "DAOs" are almost always scams. Crypto makes them easier, but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it. It is hard to argue that "they don't represent crypto" when they are 90% of what people see, and many people's first exposure to it, but of course, they don't represent crypto. They bring zero innovation, except for the best marketing copy to bring in gullible victims. Real projects (for instance, zkSync) are a lot more quiet about their marketing.
  - orev 5y ago
    > but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it. I don’t agree. The people who run traditional scams know that what they’re doing is a scam, and they take precautions to avoid criminal prosecution. This deters general people from trying to do the same thing. Crypto has this veneer of “innovation” and “disruption” that everyone has seen play out over the past decade, with huge winners (Amazon, Uber, etc.). And others are jumping on the bandwagon. They don’t believe they’re running a scam, or at least they believe they’re operating in the Wild West of no regulations and everything is fair game. There are definitely people doing crypto stuff who would not be otherwise running cons on a street corner.
- 5y ago
jbirer 5y ago
As someone who has been working as a blockchain developer for nearly 4 years, I find it funny when Ethereum fanboys tell me things like "L1 was not designed for this type of throughput", "the high fees are good" and similar things. You can tell they got into crypto and NFTs recently and they don't know the initial promises made by the Ethereum team at the beginning and are just trying to hold onto their hype bubble. Ethereum was supposed to be capable of handling the world's bulk of decentralized application and finance transactions, and Ethereum devs at some point where making fun of Bitcoin for having high fees, now they are making excuses such as "L1 was not designed for this." as the dApps are leaving for other chains. Truly a funny show of denial and cover-up.
- k__ 5y ago
  -Ethereum fanboys +maximalists
- rglullis 5y ago
  It's not so much an excuse but a learned lesson: the decentralization trilemma is real. Don't forget that Ethereum is still a research project. "Denial" and "covering-up" would only apply if the devs were still promising that the base-layer would scale by itself. But ask any serious developer and it is pretty understood that "(Complete) Decentralization, Security, Scalability... pick two" is how things will have to go.
- syntheweave 5y ago
  I sincerely thought from the beginning that Ethereum was going to implode because its core conceit of running a distributed VM was too insecure. The last straw was going to a launch party for the token and seeing the kind of people that were there; one lady ecstatically saying "we're all gonna be rich" got my senses going "they're actors - they have no real ability to discuss this tech, it's gotta be a scam", and I went home and found other alts to go into. Many years and thousands of faulty Solidity contracts later, I still haven't been entirely vindicated. I certainly missed the boat on the gains, though I still did OK overall with my other moves. As it turns out, both the type of dev and the type of investor Eth attracts have never really changed: both are a bit too awed by the raw tech and its generality to think through the application in more detail than "we can make it and you can buy it". But hey, it worked, the party is now crowded with apes; it's probably time to exit, though, cause I can't see it staying like this forever.
next_xibalba 5y ago
The article summarizes crypto’s cardinal sins. Chiefly: > Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich So if it were a handful of Indian women it would be better? More to the point, what was the author’s point? Are we to believe that the white men who’ve gotten rich on crypto did something untoward to get those riches? And if so, did they do the bad thing because of their genitalia skin color? It is stunning that these kinds of lazy, unexamined biases are accepted in non-fringe media outlets.
- ploden 5y ago
  - next_xibalba 5y ago
    Which idea(s), specifically, would you be downvoting? My GP comment has net negative votes, so it seems you're not alone. But, since you commented on downvoting it, I'm curious what I've written that warrants a downvote.
    - wepple 5y ago
      EDIT: I did not realize I was responding to the wrong comment. Leaving mine intact to avoid speculation. I did not downvote your comment. Please do not make completely unfounded assumptions like that. Downvotes are for comments that do not add to the conversation (and should not be used for things you may disagree with), and my response clearly shows that I chose to continue the conversation because I believe it’s worthy of discussion and exploration as a topic.
- hobozilla 5y ago
  The point is that it's made a group of people that are already generally rich, richer. If it made a group of Indian women it would be marginally better as there aren't as many rich Indian women as there are rich white men. Either way, I think the bigger point is that it's made a small number of people very wealthy.
biophysboy 5y ago
I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed. I think crypto is interesting and has utilities, but its not going to solve global social coordination. I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.
- otterley 5y ago
  > Its easier to make money if you have money Congratulations, you now understand how proof-of-stake works - and why it’s a bad underpinning of cryptocurrencies, although bad in a different way than proof of work. Destroy the environment or make the rich richer; pick your poison.
  - biophysboy 5y ago
    I mean, doesn't proof of work also make the rich richer, because they have better computers and more of them?
    - otterley 5y ago
      How does that invalidate my point? Both things can be true.
      - biophysboy 5y ago
        I assumed you preferred proof-of-work over stake for the reason you gave. Maybe I misinterpreted.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    This is more or less true of the company stock of any startup that wins big, so I don't get the hate. If they managed to get stability, security, low transaction fees, and is actually useful to consumers, then it seems like it might be a worthwhile project?
ricochet11 5y ago
"I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing" - I love this call for more active political positioning in the community. This is political, it always has been. Let's embrace it. AssangeDao and Ukraine raising millions, proof of integrity received a lot of support during this round of gitcoin grants, it really feels like the community is ready to push hard - expect to see more politicians/co-ops/unions/welfare groups forming as digital orgs with crypto backends.
astoor 5y ago
So within 7 years of the start of Bitcoin, pretty much every original Bitcoin developer had become disillusioned, with claims like it was "an experiment" and "has failed"[0]. We're now heading towards 7 years since the start of Ethereum, and it sounds like Vitalik is now too beginning to realise that it has turned into something a lot worse than what it tried to replace, e.g. because it magnifies the most terrible aspects of human nature. [0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Let us not think Vitalik was some sort of saint. Etherium was launched with a massive premine which the developers awarded themselves a sizable chunk of the supply before the network even came online. Not only was this pretty scammy in of itself, it also legitimized future shitcoins having similar amounts of premine
- armitron 5y ago
  If I'm being charitable, it's hard to see Vitalik as anything other than naive/"useful idiot" to the commoditize-everything hypercapitalist forces. It doesn't take a genius to show some restraint in opening one pandora's box after another. Some of the Bitcoin devs realized this early on. Ethereum, for whatever reason, didn't and it's been scamville ever since.
- 3np 5y ago
  As for Bitcoin developers, that's not really true at all. There are quite a few that are active in ecosystem development and conversation on the bitcoinhackers.org mastodon instance and a few IRC/Matrix channels. Unfortunately, Ethereum communities still seem to socialize and organize on centralized platforms like Slack, Discord, and Twitter.
SodiumMerchant0 5y ago
bigtex88 5y ago
I am truly and continually disappointed with the response to cryptocurrencies in this community. For a user-base that is so knowledgeable to be so pig-headed about this topic is frightening.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  This comment seems to be par for the course of crypto level discussions. The comment is a series of ad-hominem attacks composed manipulatively. The rational response is to be careful of anyone attempting such manipulation.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    This is something I've had a hard time understanding. Any question, even honest questions, posed to the crypto community get spit back as if a person could not be any more wrong or ignorant of something. There's this battle of either 0% or 100% committed to crypto and no in between. I have had a hard time finding genuinely honest and unbiased perspectives or even descriptions of things in crypto. Happy to know if anyone has any such sources. I'm still trying to honestly just learn about it more. Getting there bit by bit.
- emerged 5y ago
  Isn’t it possible… they are right?
  - birracerveza 5y ago
    Not really. The vast majority of the HN community that keeps rejecting cryptocurrencies, blockchain and everything related to them does so on claims that are obsolete, shortsighted and completely ignorant of the progress that has been done in the last years, if not of the ecosystem as a whole, as their opinions comes not from experience but from shoddily written opinion pieces. You can see it in your daily HN frontpaged crypto hate bait thread, such as this one. Only a few handful of comments raise genuine concerns and put enough effort to allow a constructive discussion, the rest is just people venting about how bad crypto is, with no actual insight.

106 points by hdk 5y ago

That's such odd (and against the rules) title editorializing that I had to click to confirm what's going on. Edit: and now the title has been re-editorialized a second time even though the original one isn't misleading.

mwattsun 5y ago

throwaway568 5y ago
"single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi" As true as a legislature can be described as a pen + notebook - there is value in consensus.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  I love pen and paper but I just took a look at the Build Back Better bill and it's almost 2500 pages with I'm guessing thousands of edits by hundreds of parties. Pen and paper wouldn't be my first choice for this task https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5376/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5376...
yannoninator 5y ago
Yes. And most (I would even count all) of the biggest cryptocurrencies use-cases are entirely wasteful.
beecafe 5y ago
More or less, with the addition that many people are running the computer in near lockstep allowing a consensus on the true global state of such a computer and so for its execution to be trusted.
WJW 5y ago
It's not wrong. It's also a very slow immutable but globally accessible database that's more or less free to read but every write query costs money.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  So essentially you may have thousands of computers trying to write to the same file at the same time so you implement a consensus mechanism to determine the final write, something like an n-way diff
benjaminwootton 5y ago
Gas fees are about incentivising people to take part and disincentivising bad behaviour. If you wanted to calculate pi obviously you wouldn’t do so on Ethereum. If you wanted a globally distributed ledger then you need something like gas fees in place.
- zucker42 5y ago
  No one wants a globally distributed ledger. They want to send money from one person to another. Or, to use the example that motivated Vitalik, they want a record of the items they own in a video game. A globally distributed ledger is simply a tool to accomplish that. As long as Ethereum represents a "single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi" (despite the fact that it utilizes an enormous amount of real computers), it is utterly incapable of solving those problems at any sort of scale. Take Augur, for example. A prediction market without a trusted resolver seems pretty useful, but the fact that a blockchain can't handle any real world application on-chain meant that it was unusable. Another example is that it's ridiculous on its face that CryptoKitties was able to bring Ethereum to its knees. People want to base real financial markets on this tech when a trading card game is able to congest the network and increase fees 10-fold?
delusional 5y ago
That's a fun analogy, but you're leaving out some stuff. For one, the virtual computer consumes 112.65TWh of power every year[1]. Importantly, the "gas" fees can only be paid in a special monopoly currency which you have to buy from a speculative market. IIRC you also have to pay for memory usage. [1]: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  That's almost 0.5% of all energy in the world. Are any other blockchains using close to as much energy as BTC and ETH?!?
- rafale 5y ago
  Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake this year. The environment argument is soon to become a non-issue.
  - shafyy 5y ago
    Ethereum has been moving to proof-of-stake this year for 5 years now. Will it happen some day? Probably. But we don't know how PoS will go for ETH once it has moved. Besides, there are many other negative exernalities that the move to PoS won't get rid of.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      > Will it happen some day? It doesn't happen all at once, it's a transition. There are billions staked in ETH2 already. > But we don't know how PoS will go for ETH once it has moved. There's quite a few PoS coins that are working well, Algorand comes to mind. > Besides, there are many other negative exernalities that the move to PoS won't get rid of. Such as?
      - shafyy 5y ago
        > Such as? Enabling fraud, enabling ransomware, enabling authoritarian dictators to enrich themselves. Furthermore there's still Bitcoin that will never move to PoS, and the popularity of ETH also swaps over to Bitcoin and other cryptos. Yes, yes, there are also scams in fiat money blabla. The problem here is, that cryptos are a strictly zero-sum game and don't add any value to anybody except people who are able to dump their coins to the next greater fool. So why should we accept all these disproportionate externalities?
k__ 5y ago
I had this impression too when I started reading about Ethereum. I think, the mismatch is, while Ethereum is being sold as "the world computer" and being Turing complete, it's actually more narrow in scope, because if the points you just mentioned. It's more of a decentralized and permissionless clearinghouse. If you need storage, you wouldn't use Ethereum but IPFS/Filecoin, Skynet/Sia, or Arweave. For compute, you would use Akashnet (albeit a bad example here, but I don't know something better right now). I don't know if there are plans to integrate features from other chains into Ethereum, to make it more general purpose, or if that's even possible. But right now multi-chain is where things are heading.
- pram 5y ago
  Like using AWS, but worse in every imaginable way!
  - md2020 5y ago
    AWS isn’t permissionless and decentralized, so no, it’s not at all like that. Stop with the snark.
  - k__ 5y ago
    In many ways, I would say. If censor resitance and knowing who actually paid for a service are seen as valuable to enough people, it could have a future.
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jasode 5y ago
>Ethereum is a single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi that is available to anyone with access to an internet All analogies are incomplete and imperfect but I'd say a more accurate mental model would be something like this: Ethereum is like a global database _with_ stored procedures. With this analogy, the database component would map to the blockchain : https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data_size https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data... The stored procedure language would map to the Ethereum programming language Solidity. Computers worldwide run stored procedures to decide how to write the next block(s) in the database. (Consensus.) Embedded in the above is the collective psychology and incentives that attract humans to do the above activity. (aka Proof-of-Work). To see how simple explanations of Ethereum can leave out the mass psychology aspect, consider another example of an incomplete analogy: The Reddit Place experiment of 2017 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_(Reddit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_(Reddit) ) video of the pixels evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY We could say that Reddit Place 1000x1000 art canvas is a worldwide "Adobe Photoshop" that runs slower than a 1990s 486 computer ... which is sort of true... but doesn't really explain the whole phenomenon.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  Reddit Place is really cool. Place, Hacker News, Reddit and other sites are like global Ouija boards that indicate what is currently interesting to the community mind. Wikipedia reflects what the community thinks is true about a particular subject. The item is fuzzy when it first comes to the attention of global mind but then gradually comes into focus. Hacker News and Wikipedia are not any better if we add more computing power. Ethereum is not like that. It requires bit accuracy since it deals with money and contracts. Ethereum would be have a lot more utility with more computing power.
thesausageking 5y ago
No. You're being snarky and leaving out the main point of crypto: trust and coordination. Ethereum is the first shared computer that you can execute code with someone who's openly hostile towards you and guarantee that the code will execute and perform what it was written to do. Think of it more like the patent system. A patent is just a publicly available description of your invention. You could write it up yourself and publish it to a website for $5 / mo, so why would you pay the >$10k it costs to work with a lawyer and file a patent? It's not the description of the invention itself you're paying for, but the rights you get that make it worth it to file a patent. In Ethereum, the "lawyers" and "patent examiners" are the other nodes in the network and the miners which enforce that the smart contract code ran as it was suppose to and can't be undone.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  what if the miners are hostile to you and censor the transaction.
  - Laforet 5y ago
    In that case you are screwed. The odds of every single validator turning against an individual is slim, however Ethereum is not above the act of rewriting history to undo certain transactions. They already did it once with the DAO hack and the market barely moved an eyelid when the supposedily permissonless and irrevocable world computer moves to protect those who are too big to fail.
    - aemreunal 5y ago
      It really doesn't seem slim to me. This article [0] (which was previously discussed on HN [1]) found that "just 0.1 percent of miners (about 50 operations) are responsible for half of all mining output". So it seems like a very real threat to me. I rarely hear anyone pro-crypto talk about this implicit assumption they make about the mining being "sufficiently distributed & diverse". [0]: https://www.techspot.com/news/91937-bitcoin-largely-controlled-small-group-investors-miners-study.html https://www.techspot.com/news/91937-bitcoin-largely-controll... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29008910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29008910
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bigtex88 5y ago
No. It's a worldwide state machine with permission-less read/write.
faangiq 5y ago
Yep!

Existenceblinks 5y ago

One good thing is that at least a mainstream media is getting quite details on what's actually going on despite the ratio of signal/noise is on floor.

TradingPlaces 5y ago

I Am Begging People Not To Use The Machine I Created To Do The Things It Was Created To Do

twox2 5y ago
Except that's not the case at all.
- jbirer 5y ago
  You did not even bother to make an argument on why not, so I will assume you also know he's right but don't want to leave your fanboy ideology.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    The OP was trite snark that didn't deserve a thoughtful response.
  - twox2 5y ago
    My argument is: read the article that was posted.
- TradingPlaces 5y ago
  How is that not an accurate characterization of the interview? For years, I was unsure if he was a grifter like so many in the space, or just hopelessly naïve about what he was building. This interview settles that on the latter for me.
  - twox2 5y ago
    I guess the question is if you're a glass full or glass empty kind of guy. I interpret a lot of this through a lens of optimism. Generally my read is that he wants to it to be more than bro's flaunting ape pics and wealth, and better of the environment. The rest of it isn't about how he's desperately trying to reign it in, but to offer some vision for interesting applications. Agree that he might have been a bit naive as a young kid building this thing, but I think he's a good thought leader.

hunterb123 5y ago

> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams Expected nothing less from Time...

Machado117 5y ago
Why is a modern news publication making such remark when we vilify the same thing when directed at any other group of people?
InsaneOstrich 5y ago
It's nice to see truth in journalism every once in awhile
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Everyone has their truth, they should try reporting facts instead of race-baiting for clicks.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    This is a fact though isn't it? I am anti-crypto for several reasons but even the blind can see that there isn't much diversity in the space.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      No it's a race-baiting vague assertion with no statistic, study, or source of any kind attached to it.
      - newswasboring 5y ago
        In hindi there is a saying "प्रत्यक्ष को प्रमाण की आवश्यकता नहीं होती|" ((bad) translation: The apparent does not require proof"). Look at any of the major figures in crypto, I don't see many "non white guy" people in there. Come on man, not everything requires us to do a study.

dmitriid 5y ago

> powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves It doesn't move that money. It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money. > the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs. Yeah, no. Those products are a) not new, and b) most of them don't require either ethereum in particular or blockchain in general. It's all speculative smoke and mirrors, chasing investor money. > Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong Ah yes. "You're holding it wrong". This is the only outcome of crypto in particular and blockchains in general. > Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects. No, it won't. Because the tech not only doesn't solve these problems, but makes these problems significantly worse [1] > ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world No. The ultimate goal of crypto is exactly to play million-dollar games. Just because it was used to send pretend tokens to desperate people who have no meaningful ways of using them, doesn't mean it's accomplished something meaningful in the world. > The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method Blockchain and efficient in one sentence. > Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up I can't even. And then they talk about how he "couldn't predict this", or "couldn't foresee that", or "watched with horror and dismay" when something easily predictable happened. All the while praising him for being "fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history." Clearly he's "fluent" as in "he can come off as knowledgable in a Twitter thread". See the link below for how all this was clearly predicted. [1] https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

0xy 5y ago
>It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money. If a particular item can be sold at a particular amount with predictable and transparent liquidity it is objectively worth that amount. Ford doesn't speculate a Ford F-150 is worth $30k, they have customers lined up with cash in hand ready to buy and waiting lists (liquidity), therefore they are objectively worth $30k. You wouldn't say 1 share of Amazon stock is speculatively worth $3,205. It's objectively worth that, because there's liquidity and an order book right now that will buy it for that price.

jerojero 5y ago

For a while I have been losing faith in the crypto space, though I've known about it for a really long time I have never really made any significant money in it. But I've been watching it with interest and what interested me the most was the governance aspects of it. But lately, when I look at the space, it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly. I think I am invited everyday on discord or telegram to this or that "DAO", which really are nothing but pump and dump scams with a coat of governance onto them. I do wonder, is this a feature or a bug? Humans might be naturally greedy and maybe these hyper-marketized mechanisms simply bring out the worst in us. But I will say, I really admire Vitalik and his vision, I read his blog and I love it. It makes me hopeful but maybe he might just be too optimistic. Things are not how we'd like them to be but how they are, this is a very important lesson in politics.

lekevicius 5y ago
All of these Discord and Telegram "DAOs" are almost always scams. Crypto makes them easier, but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it. It is hard to argue that "they don't represent crypto" when they are 90% of what people see, and many people's first exposure to it, but of course, they don't represent crypto. They bring zero innovation, except for the best marketing copy to bring in gullible victims. Real projects (for instance, zkSync) are a lot more quiet about their marketing.
- orev 5y ago
  > but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it. I don’t agree. The people who run traditional scams know that what they’re doing is a scam, and they take precautions to avoid criminal prosecution. This deters general people from trying to do the same thing. Crypto has this veneer of “innovation” and “disruption” that everyone has seen play out over the past decade, with huge winners (Amazon, Uber, etc.). And others are jumping on the bandwagon. They don’t believe they’re running a scam, or at least they believe they’re operating in the Wild West of no regulations and everything is fair game. There are definitely people doing crypto stuff who would not be otherwise running cons on a street corner.
5y ago

jbirer 5y ago

As someone who has been working as a blockchain developer for nearly 4 years, I find it funny when Ethereum fanboys tell me things like "L1 was not designed for this type of throughput", "the high fees are good" and similar things. You can tell they got into crypto and NFTs recently and they don't know the initial promises made by the Ethereum team at the beginning and are just trying to hold onto their hype bubble. Ethereum was supposed to be capable of handling the world's bulk of decentralized application and finance transactions, and Ethereum devs at some point where making fun of Bitcoin for having high fees, now they are making excuses such as "L1 was not designed for this." as the dApps are leaving for other chains. Truly a funny show of denial and cover-up.

k__ 5y ago
-Ethereum fanboys +maximalists
rglullis 5y ago
It's not so much an excuse but a learned lesson: the decentralization trilemma is real. Don't forget that Ethereum is still a research project. "Denial" and "covering-up" would only apply if the devs were still promising that the base-layer would scale by itself. But ask any serious developer and it is pretty understood that "(Complete) Decentralization, Security, Scalability... pick two" is how things will have to go.
syntheweave 5y ago
I sincerely thought from the beginning that Ethereum was going to implode because its core conceit of running a distributed VM was too insecure. The last straw was going to a launch party for the token and seeing the kind of people that were there; one lady ecstatically saying "we're all gonna be rich" got my senses going "they're actors - they have no real ability to discuss this tech, it's gotta be a scam", and I went home and found other alts to go into. Many years and thousands of faulty Solidity contracts later, I still haven't been entirely vindicated. I certainly missed the boat on the gains, though I still did OK overall with my other moves. As it turns out, both the type of dev and the type of investor Eth attracts have never really changed: both are a bit too awed by the raw tech and its generality to think through the application in more detail than "we can make it and you can buy it". But hey, it worked, the party is now crowded with apes; it's probably time to exit, though, cause I can't see it staying like this forever.

next_xibalba 5y ago

The article summarizes crypto’s cardinal sins. Chiefly: > Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich So if it were a handful of Indian women it would be better? More to the point, what was the author’s point? Are we to believe that the white men who’ve gotten rich on crypto did something untoward to get those riches? And if so, did they do the bad thing because of their genitalia skin color? It is stunning that these kinds of lazy, unexamined biases are accepted in non-fringe media outlets.

ploden 5y ago
- next_xibalba 5y ago
  Which idea(s), specifically, would you be downvoting? My GP comment has net negative votes, so it seems you're not alone. But, since you commented on downvoting it, I'm curious what I've written that warrants a downvote.
  - wepple 5y ago
    EDIT: I did not realize I was responding to the wrong comment. Leaving mine intact to avoid speculation. I did not downvote your comment. Please do not make completely unfounded assumptions like that. Downvotes are for comments that do not add to the conversation (and should not be used for things you may disagree with), and my response clearly shows that I chose to continue the conversation because I believe it’s worthy of discussion and exploration as a topic.
hobozilla 5y ago
The point is that it's made a group of people that are already generally rich, richer. If it made a group of Indian women it would be marginally better as there aren't as many rich Indian women as there are rich white men. Either way, I think the bigger point is that it's made a small number of people very wealthy.

biophysboy 5y ago

I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed. I think crypto is interesting and has utilities, but its not going to solve global social coordination. I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.

otterley 5y ago
> Its easier to make money if you have money Congratulations, you now understand how proof-of-stake works - and why it’s a bad underpinning of cryptocurrencies, although bad in a different way than proof of work. Destroy the environment or make the rich richer; pick your poison.
- biophysboy 5y ago
  I mean, doesn't proof of work also make the rich richer, because they have better computers and more of them?
  - otterley 5y ago
    How does that invalidate my point? Both things can be true.
    - biophysboy 5y ago
      I assumed you preferred proof-of-work over stake for the reason you gave. Maybe I misinterpreted.
- skybrian 5y ago
  This is more or less true of the company stock of any startup that wins big, so I don't get the hate. If they managed to get stability, security, low transaction fees, and is actually useful to consumers, then it seems like it might be a worthwhile project?

ricochet11 5y ago

"I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing" - I love this call for more active political positioning in the community. This is political, it always has been. Let's embrace it. AssangeDao and Ukraine raising millions, proof of integrity received a lot of support during this round of gitcoin grants, it really feels like the community is ready to push hard - expect to see more politicians/co-ops/unions/welfare groups forming as digital orgs with crypto backends.

astoor 5y ago

So within 7 years of the start of Bitcoin, pretty much every original Bitcoin developer had become disillusioned, with claims like it was "an experiment" and "has failed"[0]. We're now heading towards 7 years since the start of Ethereum, and it sounds like Vitalik is now too beginning to realise that it has turned into something a lot worse than what it tried to replace, e.g. because it magnifies the most terrible aspects of human nature. [0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

cuteboy19 5y ago
Let us not think Vitalik was some sort of saint. Etherium was launched with a massive premine which the developers awarded themselves a sizable chunk of the supply before the network even came online. Not only was this pretty scammy in of itself, it also legitimized future shitcoins having similar amounts of premine
armitron 5y ago
If I'm being charitable, it's hard to see Vitalik as anything other than naive/"useful idiot" to the commoditize-everything hypercapitalist forces. It doesn't take a genius to show some restraint in opening one pandora's box after another. Some of the Bitcoin devs realized this early on. Ethereum, for whatever reason, didn't and it's been scamville ever since.
3np 5y ago
As for Bitcoin developers, that's not really true at all. There are quite a few that are active in ecosystem development and conversation on the bitcoinhackers.org mastodon instance and a few IRC/Matrix channels. Unfortunately, Ethereum communities still seem to socialize and organize on centralized platforms like Slack, Discord, and Twitter.

SodiumMerchant0 5y ago

bigtex88 5y ago

I am truly and continually disappointed with the response to cryptocurrencies in this community. For a user-base that is so knowledgeable to be so pig-headed about this topic is frightening.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago
This comment seems to be par for the course of crypto level discussions. The comment is a series of ad-hominem attacks composed manipulatively. The rational response is to be careful of anyone attempting such manipulation.
- bmitc 5y ago
  This is something I've had a hard time understanding. Any question, even honest questions, posed to the crypto community get spit back as if a person could not be any more wrong or ignorant of something. There's this battle of either 0% or 100% committed to crypto and no in between. I have had a hard time finding genuinely honest and unbiased perspectives or even descriptions of things in crypto. Happy to know if anyone has any such sources. I'm still trying to honestly just learn about it more. Getting there bit by bit.
emerged 5y ago
Isn’t it possible… they are right?
- birracerveza 5y ago
  Not really. The vast majority of the HN community that keeps rejecting cryptocurrencies, blockchain and everything related to them does so on claims that are obsolete, shortsighted and completely ignorant of the progress that has been done in the last years, if not of the ecosystem as a whole, as their opinions comes not from experience but from shoddily written opinion pieces. You can see it in your daily HN frontpaged crypto hate bait thread, such as this one. Only a few handful of comments raise genuine concerns and put enough effort to allow a constructive discussion, the rest is just people venting about how bad crypto is, with no actual insight.