6 ms·

I understand that there is a lot of negative sentiment with various pump and dump schemes that have been going around for a while or similar bad solutions that

I understand that there is a lot of negative sentiment with various pump and dump schemes that have been going around for a while or similar bad solutions that just rope in naïve retail investors. However, I am genuinely curious what products besides stable-coins, alt-coins or NFT marketplaces are being created that rely upon base ETH tech. Is ETH meant for purely financial products or are there examples of other types?

DennisP 4y ago
Scalability limits have made it hard for non-financial applications to compete for block space. Hopefully that will change over the next few years; between rollups and danksharding it should get to 100,000 tx/sec. Here are some recent thoughts from Vitalik on non-financial uses: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/06/12/nonfin.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/06/12/nonfin.html
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  > it should get to 100,000 tx/sec. I would love to see a citation for this. This is more than VISA handles by a factor of 600
  - meowkit 4y ago
    The tx/sec are guesses. Its too soon to know what the upper limits of blockchain TPS could be. The arguments for massive TPS scaling are not that the Ethereum base chain itself will process them at transaction time, but that that L2+ chains will process transactions and settle on the ETH base chain, similar to what the ACH does. The two scaling concepts to watch for are rollups (transaction batches that are rolled up into a single state change), and sharding (similar to database sharding.) Here is a nice viewer for current TPS https://ethtps.info/ https://ethtps.info/ When requesting a “citation” I would recommend you provide the what bounds and types of information is acceptable to you.
    - dmitrygr 4y ago
      > similar to what the ACH does. ACH transaction volume is about 840 transactions per second [1]. 100,000 anywhere-to-anywhere transactions per second while making sure no money goes missing and is not double-spent worldwide is NOT a simple problem, definitely not something you can just handwave away and then claim as a reasonable "guess". [1] https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/posts/ach-key-stats-facts/ https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/posts/ach-key-stats-fact...
      - LanternLight83 4y ago
        High throughout doesn't mean a high latency; one could process a million transactions per second or block and still need half an hour to verify (ie. reach global consensus on) the transactions within each block. Ideally ofc we'd have both, but if TPS was all that counted, the trade-off could likely be made (idk what I'm talking about). "High throughout, low latency, or affordable fees: pick two."
        DennisP 4y ago
        Also it could well be broken into multiple rollups that mostly transaction within themselves, with more occasional transactions to and from the main chain or directly between rollups.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    I think you're off a zero, that would put VISA at only 167 tps. From iffy sources I found in a quick google, VISA averages 1700 tps and max capacity is significantly more. Rollups today can do around 2000 tx/sec. Their limit is block space, which will be multiplied by sharding (which in the current design, is more like RAID than actual sharding). A great overview of the roadmap is here: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-ethereum https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui...
    - dmitrygr 4y ago
      All data i find shows visa currently doing 1700QPS and able to scale to 4000QPS with current architecture. Do you have a better source?
      - DennisP 4y ago
        No, I agree. 100,000/1700 gives a factor of 60, not 600.
miohtama 4y ago
The main use cases where a blockchain makes most sense are all financials. Unless there is store of value or transfer of value, you can usually get away with less headache with centralised solutions. This being said, there are couple of notable efforts outside pure financial protocols. ENS is alternative for DNS: https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ (domain names may have a lot of value OFC) Gitcoin is a “grant DAO”: https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ Lens tries to rebuild social media with a user in control: https://lens.xyz/ https://lens.xyz/ (the long term plan is to have uncollateralised lending if we have your social graph available) Radicle aims to build censorship proof Github: https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/
- easrng 4y ago
  It's impossible to build a protocol with secure light nodes on top of ETH, so it doesn't really make sense for DNS.
  - tylersmith 4y ago
    It's not impossible it's just not currently available. The consensus is deterministic and therefore coukd be proven inside ZK proofs, enabling "ultra light clients".
    - cowtools 4y ago
      Okay, but why use a generic, bloated system like etherium? why not just fork etherium or create a system specificially optimized from the ground up (e.g. namecoin or something) for namespacing. this only serves to enrich pre-existing etherium owners above all else.
      - miohtama 4y ago
        Few reasons - The largest cost is distributed state and the cost writing key-value in global state will be the same for any blockchain - Maintaining custom block producers is massive overhead - Maintaining custom peer-to-peer network is massive overhead - Maintaining custom node software is massive overhead - Maintaining custom block explorer is massive overhead - Maintaining community and events are massive overhead - Maintaining learning material and educating developers is massive overhead The total cost of ownership (TCO) is much lower for a decentralised application on a generic blockchain than creating your own blockchain.
michaelsbradley 4y ago
Payment mechanism for, for example: Open p2p messaging protocols on the Internet Open p2p storage protocols on the Internet In other words, Ethereum at its core provides an open p2p consensus protocol on the Internet that provides a mechanism for transferring fractional/units of value between accounts. It can/does provide for much more than that given its Smart contracts facility (supporting critical contract-state changes that also require consensus), but that's the heart of it. Open p2p Consensus + Storage + Messaging == Web3 The base-layer consensus protocol that is Ethereum can be used as a substrate for the economic incentives of other open p2p protocols (i.e. not a blockchain protocols), providing strong guarantees of transaction finality.
SkyMarshal 4y ago
Every app on a blockchain is either financial, or financialized. All of them require some kind of financial transaction. Even previously non-financial things like art (which is arguably not non-financial anyway) must at minimum pay gas costs to run, can be traded, and has a market value. The technology only works due to built-in financial and economic incentives that self-fund its operation. Everything running on a blockchain must contribute to that self-funding in some way, and thus must have a financial component. Take that aspect away and at best you have Bittorrent, and at worst just a garbled mess of something that doesn't work in any way. Love it or hate, blockchain's original use case was financial. That's its DNA. I don't think it can evolve beyond that.
- k__ 4y ago
  There are gasless blockchain networks, like Koinos, and alternatives like IOTA.
- atak1 4y ago
  Yeah unfortunately right now that is the case; you pay for Ethereum to onboard and participate, and most early adopters are people buying their way in. It doesn't have to be this way though. I don't think "blockchain's original use case was financial". Bitcoin's was. I'm not sure Ethereum and subsequent platforms have the same DNA.
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    Bitcoin was the original blockchain, thus blockchain's original use case was financial. And it does have to be this way, they don't work otherwise, unless you just want Bittorrent. Regardless what Ethereum PR tries to claim, the reality is, public, permissionless, decentralized blockchains only work because they are designed to self-fund, and require everything running on them to pay into the system in some manner. They are all fundamentally financial.
    - atak1 4y ago
      This meaning of "fundamentally financial" sounds to me like designing incentive structures. If so, yes, blockchains are all "fundamentally financial". You need incentives for folks to keep the lights on. But aren't our lives "fundamentally financial" - exchanging our time for money? That doesn't mean that the work we do can't evolve beyond this fundamental incentive structure. I draw a line, for example, between the purposes of yield farming and ENS.
brian-armstrong 4y ago
Not just strictly pump-and-dumps, no. There are Ponzi schemes as well!
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
Dark Forest [1] is a game that runs completely on-chain (on the Gnosis chain [2], compatible with Ethereum) and uses ZKSnarks. Here's a fun post on it [3]. Found this to be a cool application of blockchains that aren't financial, no affiliation or otherwise. There are financial aspects of the game and you can pay money, but the devs have a faucet that just let you start playing the game. It's also really cheap to play on the official instance (which is closed for play now), but other games have really cheap buy-ins. [1]: https://zkga.me/ https://zkga.me/ [2]: https://www.gnosischain.com/ https://www.gnosischain.com/ [3]: https://omarmezenner.mirror.xyz/gFCfCVwTfUU91SDXeROEaDQe4984nbFBIgv9QSY0r1U https://omarmezenner.mirror.xyz/gFCfCVwTfUU91SDXeROEaDQe4984...
- Zaskoda 4y ago
  Dark Forest is the only game I know of that has all-on-chain game play like the game I've been working on, Orbiter 8. The two games have a lot in common, actually. Both are space games, with planets as assets, 2D views of the game map, all on-chain, written in Solidity, client agnostic, etc. But the two games are still distinctly different in how they play. Also, we are still in alpha and haven't released any battle features. Our last demo only has trade, but it's multichain and we're planning on bridging the ships so they're cross chain. You'll get to take your ship into universes that exist on other networks, ti's gonna be kinda neat: https://orbiter8.com/play https://orbiter8.com/play
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    You might like 0xMonaco: https://0xmonaco.ctf.paradigm.xyz/ https://0xmonaco.ctf.paradigm.xyz/
    - Zaskoda 4y ago
      I do like. TY
- nameless912 4y ago
  But...why isn't this game better served by just throwing all the data in $DATABASE? This is what I don't understand about blockchain games, the idea of having to buy a currency to play a game is not new, and the blockchain doesn't seem to add anything at all.
sf_sugar_daddy 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zeroclip 4y ago
Financial services: lending, borrowing, fractionalization, using oracles to peg tokens to real-world assets like USD and EUR, equities, perhaps eventually physical goods like gold bullion, high-end liquor, physical property. Payments: transfers, escrow, crowdfunds, auctions, charitable giving, royalty splitting. Digital property: name aliases, user accounts, single sign on. See Lens Protocol and Farcaster which build on these ideas. Art and collectibles, obviously. See Art Blocks, Foundation, SuperRare. Experimental protocols and games like PoolTogether, 0xMonaco CTF, Dark Forest. Privacy preserving payment rails like Aztec, Polygon Nightfall. Game economies like Skyweaver. Once Ethereum development is a little further along and L2 landscape more mature, there will be a lot more applications that can start to be built on top of the ledger. Think higher-level abstractions like ticketing, in-app and in-game assets, better payment processors. These would not use Ethereum mainnet directly for every transaction, but instead use a higher-level abstraction like a zkEVM rollup or validium.

DennisP 4y ago

Scalability limits have made it hard for non-financial applications to compete for block space. Hopefully that will change over the next few years; between rollups and danksharding it should get to 100,000 tx/sec. Here are some recent thoughts from Vitalik on non-financial uses: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/06/12/nonfin.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/06/12/nonfin.html

dmitrygr 4y ago
> it should get to 100,000 tx/sec. I would love to see a citation for this. This is more than VISA handles by a factor of 600
- meowkit 4y ago
  The tx/sec are guesses. Its too soon to know what the upper limits of blockchain TPS could be. The arguments for massive TPS scaling are not that the Ethereum base chain itself will process them at transaction time, but that that L2+ chains will process transactions and settle on the ETH base chain, similar to what the ACH does. The two scaling concepts to watch for are rollups (transaction batches that are rolled up into a single state change), and sharding (similar to database sharding.) Here is a nice viewer for current TPS https://ethtps.info/ https://ethtps.info/ When requesting a “citation” I would recommend you provide the what bounds and types of information is acceptable to you.
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    > similar to what the ACH does. ACH transaction volume is about 840 transactions per second [1]. 100,000 anywhere-to-anywhere transactions per second while making sure no money goes missing and is not double-spent worldwide is NOT a simple problem, definitely not something you can just handwave away and then claim as a reasonable "guess". [1] https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/posts/ach-key-stats-facts/ https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/posts/ach-key-stats-fact...
    - LanternLight83 4y ago
      High throughout doesn't mean a high latency; one could process a million transactions per second or block and still need half an hour to verify (ie. reach global consensus on) the transactions within each block. Ideally ofc we'd have both, but if TPS was all that counted, the trade-off could likely be made (idk what I'm talking about). "High throughout, low latency, or affordable fees: pick two."
      - DennisP 4y ago
        Also it could well be broken into multiple rollups that mostly transaction within themselves, with more occasional transactions to and from the main chain or directly between rollups.
- DennisP 4y ago
  I think you're off a zero, that would put VISA at only 167 tps. From iffy sources I found in a quick google, VISA averages 1700 tps and max capacity is significantly more. Rollups today can do around 2000 tx/sec. Their limit is block space, which will be multiplied by sharding (which in the current design, is more like RAID than actual sharding). A great overview of the roadmap is here: https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-ethereum https://members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-hitchhikers-gui...
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    All data i find shows visa currently doing 1700QPS and able to scale to 4000QPS with current architecture. Do you have a better source?
    - DennisP 4y ago
      No, I agree. 100,000/1700 gives a factor of 60, not 600.

miohtama 4y ago

The main use cases where a blockchain makes most sense are all financials. Unless there is store of value or transfer of value, you can usually get away with less headache with centralised solutions. This being said, there are couple of notable efforts outside pure financial protocols. ENS is alternative for DNS: https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ (domain names may have a lot of value OFC) Gitcoin is a “grant DAO”: https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ Lens tries to rebuild social media with a user in control: https://lens.xyz/ https://lens.xyz/ (the long term plan is to have uncollateralised lending if we have your social graph available) Radicle aims to build censorship proof Github: https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/

easrng 4y ago
It's impossible to build a protocol with secure light nodes on top of ETH, so it doesn't really make sense for DNS.
- tylersmith 4y ago
  It's not impossible it's just not currently available. The consensus is deterministic and therefore coukd be proven inside ZK proofs, enabling "ultra light clients".
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Okay, but why use a generic, bloated system like etherium? why not just fork etherium or create a system specificially optimized from the ground up (e.g. namecoin or something) for namespacing. this only serves to enrich pre-existing etherium owners above all else.
    - miohtama 4y ago
      Few reasons - The largest cost is distributed state and the cost writing key-value in global state will be the same for any blockchain - Maintaining custom block producers is massive overhead - Maintaining custom peer-to-peer network is massive overhead - Maintaining custom node software is massive overhead - Maintaining custom block explorer is massive overhead - Maintaining community and events are massive overhead - Maintaining learning material and educating developers is massive overhead The total cost of ownership (TCO) is much lower for a decentralised application on a generic blockchain than creating your own blockchain.

michaelsbradley 4y ago

Payment mechanism for, for example: Open p2p messaging protocols on the Internet Open p2p storage protocols on the Internet In other words, Ethereum at its core provides an open p2p consensus protocol on the Internet that provides a mechanism for transferring fractional/units of value between accounts. It can/does provide for much more than that given its Smart contracts facility (supporting critical contract-state changes that also require consensus), but that's the heart of it. Open p2p Consensus + Storage + Messaging == Web3 The base-layer consensus protocol that is Ethereum can be used as a substrate for the economic incentives of other open p2p protocols (i.e. not a blockchain protocols), providing strong guarantees of transaction finality.

SkyMarshal 4y ago

Every app on a blockchain is either financial, or financialized. All of them require some kind of financial transaction. Even previously non-financial things like art (which is arguably not non-financial anyway) must at minimum pay gas costs to run, can be traded, and has a market value. The technology only works due to built-in financial and economic incentives that self-fund its operation. Everything running on a blockchain must contribute to that self-funding in some way, and thus must have a financial component. Take that aspect away and at best you have Bittorrent, and at worst just a garbled mess of something that doesn't work in any way. Love it or hate, blockchain's original use case was financial. That's its DNA. I don't think it can evolve beyond that.

k__ 4y ago
There are gasless blockchain networks, like Koinos, and alternatives like IOTA.
atak1 4y ago
Yeah unfortunately right now that is the case; you pay for Ethereum to onboard and participate, and most early adopters are people buying their way in. It doesn't have to be this way though. I don't think "blockchain's original use case was financial". Bitcoin's was. I'm not sure Ethereum and subsequent platforms have the same DNA.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  Bitcoin was the original blockchain, thus blockchain's original use case was financial. And it does have to be this way, they don't work otherwise, unless you just want Bittorrent. Regardless what Ethereum PR tries to claim, the reality is, public, permissionless, decentralized blockchains only work because they are designed to self-fund, and require everything running on them to pay into the system in some manner. They are all fundamentally financial.
  - atak1 4y ago
    This meaning of "fundamentally financial" sounds to me like designing incentive structures. If so, yes, blockchains are all "fundamentally financial". You need incentives for folks to keep the lights on. But aren't our lives "fundamentally financial" - exchanging our time for money? That doesn't mean that the work we do can't evolve beyond this fundamental incentive structure. I draw a line, for example, between the purposes of yield farming and ENS.

brian-armstrong 4y ago

Not just strictly pump-and-dumps, no. There are Ponzi schemes as well!

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

Dark Forest [1] is a game that runs completely on-chain (on the Gnosis chain [2], compatible with Ethereum) and uses ZKSnarks. Here's a fun post on it [3]. Found this to be a cool application of blockchains that aren't financial, no affiliation or otherwise. There are financial aspects of the game and you can pay money, but the devs have a faucet that just let you start playing the game. It's also really cheap to play on the official instance (which is closed for play now), but other games have really cheap buy-ins. [1]: https://zkga.me/ https://zkga.me/ [2]: https://www.gnosischain.com/ https://www.gnosischain.com/ [3]: https://omarmezenner.mirror.xyz/gFCfCVwTfUU91SDXeROEaDQe4984nbFBIgv9QSY0r1U https://omarmezenner.mirror.xyz/gFCfCVwTfUU91SDXeROEaDQe4984...

Zaskoda 4y ago
Dark Forest is the only game I know of that has all-on-chain game play like the game I've been working on, Orbiter 8. The two games have a lot in common, actually. Both are space games, with planets as assets, 2D views of the game map, all on-chain, written in Solidity, client agnostic, etc. But the two games are still distinctly different in how they play. Also, we are still in alpha and haven't released any battle features. Our last demo only has trade, but it's multichain and we're planning on bridging the ships so they're cross chain. You'll get to take your ship into universes that exist on other networks, ti's gonna be kinda neat: https://orbiter8.com/play https://orbiter8.com/play
- zeroclip 4y ago
  You might like 0xMonaco: https://0xmonaco.ctf.paradigm.xyz/ https://0xmonaco.ctf.paradigm.xyz/
  - Zaskoda 4y ago
    I do like. TY
nameless912 4y ago
But...why isn't this game better served by just throwing all the data in $DATABASE? This is what I don't understand about blockchain games, the idea of having to buy a currency to play a game is not new, and the blockchain doesn't seem to add anything at all.

sf_sugar_daddy 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zeroclip 4y ago

Financial services: lending, borrowing, fractionalization, using oracles to peg tokens to real-world assets like USD and EUR, equities, perhaps eventually physical goods like gold bullion, high-end liquor, physical property. Payments: transfers, escrow, crowdfunds, auctions, charitable giving, royalty splitting. Digital property: name aliases, user accounts, single sign on. See Lens Protocol and Farcaster which build on these ideas. Art and collectibles, obviously. See Art Blocks, Foundation, SuperRare. Experimental protocols and games like PoolTogether, 0xMonaco CTF, Dark Forest. Privacy preserving payment rails like Aztec, Polygon Nightfall. Game economies like Skyweaver. Once Ethereum development is a little further along and L2 landscape more mature, there will be a lot more applications that can start to be built on top of the ledger. Think higher-level abstractions like ticketing, in-app and in-game assets, better payment processors. These would not use Ethereum mainnet directly for every transaction, but instead use a higher-level abstraction like a zkEVM rollup or validium.