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Interview: Vitalik Buterin
- michaelwww 4y agoThis is a great article. Buterin's critique of Bitcoin was very interesting.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
- habitue 4y agoAlso, you're free to look at his actual statements and evaluate them based on how reasonable they seem to you. Not everything has to be evaluated from the perspective of conflict of interest
- iLoveOncall 4y agoHe is trying to sell Proof of Stake because Etherium is migrating to it. It has as many flaws as Proof of Work and is even less decentralized. Blockchain is a rotten technology anyway so there’s nothing good to see there.
- moneywoes 4y agoAre you bullish on any crypto
- iLoveOncall 4y agoNo, crypto as a whole offer no advantage over fiat but major inconveniences, and it is built on top of the worst piece of technology ever created by mankind.
- googlryas 4y agoIt's not like it is just some fact of nature that Ethereum is migrating to proof of stake, and Vitalik is trying to find some post-hoc justification for it. It's migrating exactly because Vitalik and others convinced a lot of people involved in Ethereum that it should migrate to PoS. And why did he convince them of that? Because he believes it is a better system. Have you presented what you believe to be the flaws in the system to any Ethereum developers? Do you think you understand PoS generally or specifically their PoS implementation better than they do?
- verdverm 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyP0uxxB6V8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyP0uxxB6V8
- googlryas 4y agoWhy do you suspect Ethereum developers aren't reverting all of their plans and sticking with PoW after seeing this video?
- verdverm 4y agoTheir relative benefit from the new rules is greater?
- googlryas 4y agoHow are they benefiting by destroying the network that they have a lot of assets in?
- verdverm 4y agoWhy does centralization or regulatory capture imply destruction of the network? Maybe it means the opposite and more people will be willing to use it for financial transactions? Only time will tell
- brobinson 4y agoIt is more decentralized, though? It's also more expensive to perform a 51% attack against it. https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png https://i.redd.it/5lhlmwdg27j91.png (imgur mirror: https://imgur.com/a/eGNG7r0 https://imgur.com/a/eGNG7r0)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rvz 4y agoExactly. I disagree with both the points made about both Bitcoin, and Ethereum made by Vitalk. Proof of Work (PoW) is more 'decentralized' and censorship resistant than Proof-of-Stake (PoS) at the cost of burning up the planet and PoS is the direct opposite, and Vitalik knows this and has to do everything he can to protect this and his bags / holdings for the Ethereum fans and maximalists. The problem with Bitcoin is that it cannot realistically be used as a form of payment and it is effectively useless for on-chain payments and unable to scale properly with lots of users just to be better than the current existing payments system as it was meant to be a "decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system". Before someone says Lightning, it isn't Bitcoin and defeats the point of using Bitcoin for on-chain payments as the system tends to centralization. As Ethereum becomes more centralized with the Merge, I would expect it to abandon the claim of it being 'decentralized', so it will be just like any other permissioned validator chain that eventually needs to comply with regulations and validators will begin censoring addresses. So for them to be regarded as remotely 'useful', they have to abandon their claims of 'decentralization' because without centralization, they are both useless.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agohttps://vitalik.ca/general/2022/04/01/maximalist.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/04/01/maximalist.html "In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism", Vitalik Buterin
- adastra22 4y agoWhich critique? I searched for bitcoin in the article and didn’t find anything critiquing Bitcoin itself.
- simonw 4y agoThis bit in particular was interesting, talking about the comparative security of proof-of-stake Ethereum and proof-of-work Bitcoin. > In the case of Bitcoin, I'm worried for two reasons. First, in the long term, Bitcoin security is going to come entirely from fees, and Bitcoin is just not succeeding at getting the level of fee revenue required to secure what could be a multi-trillion-dollar system. Bitcoin fees are about $300,000 per day and haven't really grown that much over the last five years. Ethereum is much more successful at this, because the Ethereum blockchain is much more designed to support usage and applications. Second, proof of work provides much less security per dollar spent on transaction fees than proof of stake, and Bitcoin migrating away from proof of work seems to be politically infeasible. What would a future look like when there's $5 trillion of Bitcoin, but it only takes $5 billion to attack the chain? I can't bold here, but if I could I would have bolded "What would a future look like when there's $5 trillion of Bitcoin, but it only takes $5 billion to attack the chain? ".
- once_inc 4y agoWhat would the absolute worst outcome of that attack be? Miners don't have the option of spending from addresses they don't have the private keys of; all they can do is rewrite history to a certain extent. Would it be bothersome? Yes. Would a globally used bitcoin monetary base layer have complete backing of nation-states using it? Yes. Would people be hesitant to transact during the attack? Probably. None of these things are of immediate consequence, while the attacker spends its funds rewriting history and getting blowback from everyone online. Then there is the issue of getting to 51% in the first place, and retaining that 51% once it is clear something nefarious is happening. Many miningpools are conglomerates of individual miners, who certainly have the option of switching to other parties at their whim. I think proof of work is the only viable way currently known to man to ensure a fair, even monetary playing field at global scale. PoS is not proven, and Ethereum does not scale because it optimized for parameters that aren't relevant for a system that is supposed to be online for at least a century, if not longer.
- jiggawatts 4y ago> ”…who just wants to build cool stuff and not rip anybody off.” I think it’s a scathing indictment of the entire crypto industry that this is how its key figures are introduced. It’s like introducing a mafia boss and starting off with saying that he hasn’t killed anyone.
- jmeister 4y agoNo, it’s a scathing indictment of NS’s audience: mainstream economists cynical about crypto(the hostility between the two groups is mutual).
- jiggawatts 4y agoThat’s like saying that introduction of a Mafia boss as “not a killer” is a scathing indictment of the Police. After all, the hostility between the Mafia and the Police is mutual.
- seydor 4y agoyet
- cercatrova 4y agoYet Ethereum is pretty centralized with stuff like the premine, and it's even more centralized with ETH 2.0, the Merge, which moves it to Proof-Of-Stake. Now, the richest (read: Vitalik and co) are the ones who can change the course of ETH. Well, they could before too with the hard fork but now they can do it even more so.
- AgentME 4y agoValidators in proof of stake have less control than miners had in proof of work. They don't control the rules, they just control the order transactions get into blocks. They can't even censor transactions unless a majority of validators/miners work together to do so. Unlike in proof of work, in proof of stake any validators that are seen attempting double-spending attacks can have their invested stake slashed; in proof of work, miners that attempt double-spend attacks don't lose their mining hardware and are free to continue attempting to manipulate the system.
- trevmckendrick 4y agoGenuinely curious where patio11 disagrees with this interview & why
- vzaliva 4y ago
- synesso 4y ago
- dang 4y agoOk, but please don't break the site guidelines when posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rvz 4y agoTo be fair, they're not wrong though. It's getting centralized so much that they might as well get JP Morgan to run and fund the whole thing. [0] But it's a shame they were breaking the guidelines. [0] https://coinculture.com/au/business/the-secret-disclosed-jpmorgan-owns-critical-ethereum-infrastructure/ https://coinculture.com/au/business/the-secret-disclosed-jpm...
- dang 4y agoAs your comment implies, the HN guidelines don't have much to do with being right or being wrong. They're mostly about how to behave when one is right (or feels one is), or someone else is wrong (or one feels they are). Feeling right is what makes people feel like it's ok to be snarky or mean. People often say "but I'm just pointing out facts", but this is not a good argument - there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20facts%20-related&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Truth is what we're after, so posting right things and correcting wrong things is important. Yet if you think about it, it's neither a sufficient condition for a good HN post, nor a necessary one. It isn't sufficient because people sometimes express true things in aggressive ways that damage the container and end up discrediting the truth*. That hurts all of us. It isn't a necessary condition, either, because people are often wrong in good faith, with the intention of finding the truth. There shouldn't be a rule against that. Freedom to make mistakes is essential to curiosity and finding the truth in the end. And such a rule would be impossible to enforce in any case, since we don't have a truth meter. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- mistrial9 4y ago> "... Anyway, your argument about the security per dollar afforded by proof-of-stake makes total sense; Bitcoin's high energy costs are actually high security costs." this interviewer is impressive; that's a complex point with evidence in recent writings by VB. Right there you can see that these questions are well-prepared
- funstuff007 4y ago> This time, the bull market lasted nearly one and a half years. People seemed to adjust into the mentality that the higher prices are a new normal. No mention of the Fed balance sheet by Vitalik. How come? He's clearly too smart to be ignorant of the Fed's money printing and its dramatic effect on crypto prices.
- wmf 4y agoAFAIK QE was going on continuously during crypto's boom and bust cycles so maybe crypto people tuned it out.
- ianai 4y agoHow does that statement not make people who bought at or near the high furious? It’d be like a housing developer being caught on tape laughing at the buyers of their properties at their peak (say 2006-2007) on a hot mic in 2009-2010. For the record, I still don’t have a good explanation for a persons willingness to pay currency for any crypto. The relationship to QE is thus impossible outside of general trends. Raising seas rise all boats stuff.
- rr808 4y agoWhy worry about the Fed printing dollars when you can create magically create new cryptos and print those instead. Money supply measures should count crypto too.
- preseinger 4y agoMoney is the exclusive right of sovereign nations. Crypto is not money.
- dependsiguess 4y ago
- throwawayQuwcy 4y agoMoney is the exclusive right of sovereign nations! How else are Erdogan, Madura, et al going to fund their piggy banks & militaries?
- memorable 4y ago"Wait, isn't Ethereum a game?" - My brother
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoFor some! Until the tax-man comes.
- littlestymaar 4y agoFunny to see Noah Smith on HN, I had never heard of Noah Smith before, until this week when he clashed with Bret Devereaux on twitter[1][2], then through an exchange of blog posts[3][4]. Typical instance of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. I can't say I'm holding him in high esteem after that though. [1] https://nitter.42l.fr/Noahpinion/status/1561837736843431936#m https://nitter.42l.fr/Noahpinion/status/1561837736843431936#... [2] https://nitter.42l.fr/BretDevereaux/status/1562115125066211328#m https://nitter.42l.fr/BretDevereaux/status/15621151250662113... [3] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/on-the-wisdom-of-the-historians https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/on-the-wisdom-of-the-histo... [4] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/29/new-acquisitions-on-the-wisdom-of-noah-smith/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/29/new-acquisitions-on-the-wisdom...
- vosper 4y agoI am a non-paying subscriber to his Substack; I generally enjoy his writing there. I don't know enough economics to know if I/we/anyone should agree with him, but you might want to read a few of the articles if you're still interested in his viewpoints.
- TimJRobinson 4y agoVitalik recently gave a great talk on "Ideas worth building" in crypto [0]. He's focusing a lot more on non-financial use cases lately and what use cases L2 scaling (10-1000x throughput improvement) unlocks. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp3cDq2LiBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp3cDq2LiBM