32 ms·

What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me

333 points by anonu 4y ago

anonu 4y ago
My summary on Vitalik's ETH application ecosystem outlook. 5 key application categories: 1. Money. Post-merge transactions are now faster. bigger push towards on-chain transactions thanks to FTX. 3 types of stablecoins: centralized, DAO-governed, and governance-minimized. 2. DEFI: success today in prediction markets like Augur, Metaculus, Polymarket. Synthetic assets like replicating stocks. Glue layer to trade between assets. 3. The identity ecosystem: ENS, SIWE (Sign in With Ethereum), PoH (Proof of Humanity), POAPs (Proof of Attendance Protocol), SBTs. 3 main uses: Basic Auth, Attestations, Proof of personhood. Privacy is the biggest challenge. 4. DAOs. Broad term today referring to both governance structure (protecting against inside attacks) and implementation (protecting against outside attacks). Decentralization is for robustness, efficiency, interoperability. New governance mechanisms like quadratic voting, futarchy, liquid democracy can be valuable for both robustness and efficiency. 5. Hybrid apps: voting, govt registries, corporate accounting, supply chain apps, tracking access auth. In conclusion: many new applications have limited use today due to limitations in tech. Blockchains don't scale and transactions are slow. Privacy issues will remain a hurdle. All solvable problems. Most important apps will be non-financial and not have a token which will make them slow to grow - but will bring lasting value to users.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Was this summary brought to us by ChatGPT?
senttoschool 4y ago
In blockchain, choose 2/3: security, performance, decentralization. BTC = security, decentralization ETH PoW = security, decentralization ETH PoS = security, performance It also applies to real world tech. For example, Visa is performance and security. This means if Bitcoin or ETH ever wants to process as many transactions as Visa, it'll slowly morph into a centralized Oracle database.
- solumunus 4y ago
  You choose security and decentralization for the main chain and then use layer 2 for performance. This is the clear path forward, pretty well established by now.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    So you can securely prove that your centralized and insecure layer 2 has indeed transfered all of your money away to them? Great plan.
    - miracle2k 4y ago
      No, the layer 2 inherits the trust-assumptions and security of the L1.
      - lawn 4y ago
        This is ridiculos and false. For instance, with LN you have to be online to secure your funds, otherwise you might lose them. L2 only inherits the security of L1 when it settles, which by definition is not that often (that's the whole point!).
        DennisP 4y ago
        LN's shortcomings are not issues for zkrollups on Ethereum. Transactions are stored on chain, just in compressed form. A contract checks the validity of all transactions before storing them. The proofs are expensive to generate, but so cheap to verify that a contract can do it on chain.
        everfree 4y ago
        Some types of L2, like roll-ups, settle to L1 every block. The "whole point" of L2 is to reduce the amount of resources used to settle its transactions on L1. Some L2s, like Lightning Network, achieve this by settling infrequently. But other L2s, like roll-ups, achieve it by batching transactions in clever ways so that less L1 resources are used on a per-transaction basis.
mattlondon 4y ago
I don't see how privacy can ever be solved with blockchain. By design, everything you ever do is permanently out in the open for ever and ever for anyone to not only see what you did, but mathematically prove that it was you (well, your key at least) that did it. Sure you can be "anonymous" when using your wallet etc, but as we all know it is usually trivial to de-anonymize large data sets. Likewise, being anonymous when using a wallet then removes a lot of the perceived value of using it for identity verification (e.g. sign-ins, proof of humanity etc).
- leashless 4y ago
  See https://docs.zksync.io/zkevm/#what-is-zkevm-and-why-is-this-a-big-deal https://docs.zksync.io/zkevm/#what-is-zkevm-and-why-is-this-... Basically you can make transactions anonymous using much the same kind of protection as you have between public and private keys. There is a proof the transaction is valid but that is basically all you can see.
  - JofArnold 4y ago
    Sounds like a good idea. Until, like Tornado, the tech gets sanctioned.
    - camgunz 4y ago
      I feel like your downvotes are undeserved. From an engineering perspective, all Tornado did was add anonymity/plausible deniability to the blockchain--which is all that ZK will do. Maybe there's a question as to whether OFEC will also see ZK as money laundering, but my guess is they won't until it gets to a certain scale and then they will--exactly like Tornado. That limit was ~$7 billion, which is < 1 FTX, and far smaller than the current market cap of Ethereum.
    - audunw 4y ago
      Yeah, I feel like cryptocurrencies only have a chance of providing value to some users if it's not actually very succesfull. - If it's successful in providing anonymous transactions to everyone: Regulated to death due to laws aimed at combating money laundering and organized crimes. Even cryptocurrencies that aren't perfectly anonymous will probably eventually be regulated to death for not providing good enough guarantees about the identity of the wallet holders. - If it threatens the Eurodollar as a world reserve currency: regulated to death at least in USA and probably Europe. In what scenario can cryptocurrencies actually achieve its goals without risking being regulated to death? And yes, I know you can't effectively ban all trade of cryptocurrencies. But trade will always be a niche if most people can't use it in the real world.
johnnymorgan 4y ago
Holy crap, Augur is still going! Amazing, they are an OG of the first wave of ICO token..good to see them still operating. I've stayed out of it the last few years and just maintained a high view of the market. It seemed obvious to me this was all going to blow up, sad about BlockFi but once I saw them ink the FTX deal I knew they were done. Too soon for that play... The story of Crypto!
- negamax 4y ago
  They took a lion's share of money and Augur creator now runs an investment fund. They weren't successfully in the sense, people successfully gamed the outcome
  - spir 4y ago
    this is true. Augur is not a success story. It's a story of mismanagement, legal "embezzlement" of tens of millions of dollars due to lack of legal safeguards, and squandering of the opportunity to build a truly great prediction market platform.
leashless 4y ago
We're building on Ethereum. Live projects for customers for 18 months. The product is an NFT which gives you legal ownership of an underlying physical object when you buy it. An individually numbered bar of gold in a vault. A scarce collectible. Real estate. The real estate thing is interesting: transfer time goes down from around 4 months in the UK to a couple of days. The only delay is the KYCAMLCTFPEPOFACT checking: if that's done as a pre-clearing step the transfer of real estate will be instantaneous. It took several years to build this capability. The blockchain is not done. http://mattereum.com/land http://mattereum.com/land
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  As I don't know how it works in the UK: is there no registry where ownership of land is being held or can that already be edited/updated in real time to transfer real estate?
  - chrisbaker98 4y ago
    Yes, there is: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/land-registry https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/land-registry
    - leashless 4y ago
      The issue is the conveyancing process as a whole. It's extremely slow and expensive.
- bjelkeman-again 4y ago
  Having bought and sold property in the UK and comparing it to Sweden, for example, then I can only say that the UK process is archaic and incredibly cumbersome. So this is a very interesting place to improve the process. If you can get the legal process to stick and not end up with some edgecase situations where people end up losing their right to the property, this I think could be of real value to the UK. Disclosure: I have known @leashless since way before Ethereum.
skilled 4y ago
Is Vitalik like the one sane guy in crypto that doesn't actually try to be a bro and simply has an idea of his destiny and is living through it? I don't follow crypto almost at all, and HN/Twitter are probably the only two places where I will ever hear about it. I don't know him personally but from what I have seen - Vitalik has a lot of great qualities as a person (even outside of crypto, he makes good points on society), and when he does share his thoughts on crypto, it comes off as non-invasive, just ideas and plans that make sense and could be implemented in a way that doesn't push people around. Who else in crypto does this?
- unpopularopp 4y ago
  >Is Vitalik like the one sane guy in crypto In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King
- fukthat 4y ago
  Vitalik looks good in a field shit. Don't forget Vitalik bro behavior caused the ETH and ETH Classic split - the DAO valid transaction that was meant to be immutable all of a sudden was reversed as in Slack (or was it IRC?) as king and controlling Vitalik said jump and everyone (or at least 60% of the decentralized network of friends) said how high - this then mapped to the ETH Classic split and all sorts of meta discussions but but but well he took control because he was acting in the greater good and therefore the miners acted in greater good as by design so we're still cool and kinda of immutable right? ... right? - fuck that sillyness. Do you believe this dog shit any more than SBF being innocent? Has this got better with PoS - I don't know but would be interested in hearing?
- 127 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mypastself 4y ago
  I feel it’s almost a shame he isn’t utilizing his intellect and thoughtfulness in a domain more obviously useful for humanity, but he might have just gone to sell ads for a FAANG if he weren’t a crypto pioneer. Also, even as someone who’s dabbled in the space and found it lacking in many areas, I can’t say with any degree of certainty that there’s no future in his particular flavor of the blockchain technology.
galfarragem 4y ago
Ethereum's main competitive advantage is having a leader like Vitalik. Another leader but an order of magnitude less known is Andre Cronje from Fantom. It worths a read (so much transparency in a crypto company is unusual): https://andrecronje.medium.com/fantom-an-inside-financial-peak-at-being-a-crypto-company-323d29fb5e81 https://andrecronje.medium.com/fantom-an-inside-financial-pe...
- dylkil 4y ago
  Andre is pretty much hated now. He created a shit ton of useless tokens in 2020 and 2021, made multiple millions off them, disappeared, and now has come back to preach to word of regulation to prevent others doing what he got away it.
  - practice9 4y ago
    While Cronje may be a good developer, he is also close to SBF level of scam (and he's more clever). He also knowingly associated with Omar Dhanani / 0xSifu / Michael Patryn, who is another scammer who served time in US prison
- anonporridge 4y ago
  But also, one of Ethereum's biggest risks is having a leader. Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation are a dangerous point of centralization that at least expose it to risk of harsher regulation in the near future for years operating as an unregistered security. The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity. Beyond the governmental risk of Ethereum having a clear head with a throat to choke, there's the simple "hit by a bus" risk. Vitalik is just a single human, and his unexpected death could lead to a massive collapse of confidence from both investors and developers who have other options. It wouldn't completely die with him, but it would be a major setback, because the cult of Vitalik is a not insignificant part of Ethereum.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    > The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity. I think any token that gains enough prominence in the market is going to eventually fall under government purview. Why? Because when financial crime happens, victims want the government to go after the criminals and recover their lost funds. Crypto fans can't have it both ways: if their goal is to create a financial system that lives entirely outside of government control, then they shouldn't reasonably rely on the government to go after the criminals bringing the entire crypto space down. The reason that the government winds up stepping in is because the chaos and instability created by this completely unregulated side-chain financial system winds up threatening the Federally backed system as well. Market contagion is real and collapses in one sector or market often reverberate across the entire system. We're seeing it happen in banking right now: a bunch of banks made small business loans to miners that are now underwater because the price of crypto tanked and the GPU market cooled, so their revenue and equipment value has tanked at the same time.
dmitriid 4y ago
> Hybrid apps: voting, govt registries, corporate accounting, supply chain apps, tracking access auth. Yeah, no. Literally none of these benefit from blockchains. Moreover, blockchains make many of these things worse. This was already described eloquently, and with examples, 4 years ago: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... Why are these crypto maximalists still pretending it's a thing?
- cle 4y ago
  > This was already described eloquently, and with examples, 4 years ago: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... Why are these crypto maximalists still pretending it's a thing? Because they don't agree with those conclusions.
  - cto_of_antifa 4y ago
- meowkit 4y ago
  That author is a dismissive ass - makes it hard to take his points seriously.
- TimJRobinson 4y ago
  Like most anti-crypto authors he still misses the forest for the trees. Trusting software is better than trusting humans because if the software is immutable you only have to trust it once! I don't know why so many people don't get this. When you trust human systems you have to keep trusting them forever, because humans are fickle and could decide to screw you at any time.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    For starters, people have figured out how to run pretty solid and stable elections for while without needing anything but most basic technology. Also, if you have a society where no-one trust anyone, no amount of software will fix that. People can then just not accept the result of software and do what they please. Immutability is totally irrelevant at that point.
alex_suzuki 4y ago
You’d be hard-pressed to find a coffee shop around here that accepts ETH. I’m sure there’s a significant number of individuals that would know how to accept a crypto payment, but shops, small businesses, that have accounting requirements… I’m skeptical. Disclaimer: I hold ETH.
- conorcleary 4y ago
  Shopify has crypto-accepting methods of payments
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Awesome. Now my coffee is available at a random cost. If I just forgo the coffee it's cloth in crypto tomorrow might be able to buy me a PS5. What a wonderful system!
    - csisnett 4y ago
      When you pay with crypto you get a price in crypto and a time to pay it. Is not a random cost you know how much you have to pay
      - giantrobot 4y ago
        The dollar value of that crypto price is variable. Even if the price in crypto constantly updates, the cost to you in dollars is always in flux. For no discernible reason a cryptocoin can fluctuate in value. Today one coin will buy a coffee while tomorrow one coin will buy a PS5. There's no incentive to transact with crypto if there's any assumption the value of that crypto will go up tomorrow. For a seller they can get wiped out if they accepted payment for coffee in crypto and then the value of that coin tanks. Knowing the crypto price is immaterial. You can never know what the value of the item will be. It's like paying for everything with lottery tickets.
        mrguyorama 4y ago
bilsbie 4y ago
As a casual observer I never got an update on PoS. How’s that going?
- v64 4y ago
  The transition to proof of stake occurred in September [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/15/ethereum-switches-to-proof-of-stake-consensus-after-completing-the-merge/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/15/ethereum-switches-to-proof...
  - Nursie 4y ago
    But IIRC there are issues with un-staking? Definitely a big leap forward in terms of reducing energy use.
    - v64 4y ago
      EIP-4895 [1] will enable beacon chain withdrawals and will be included in the next Ethereum upgrade scheduled for next year. No actual release date has been decided yet [2]. [1] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4895 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4895 [2] https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/12/01/when-will-ethereum-stakers-be-able-to-withdraw-their-funds-heres-what-we-know-so-far/ https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/12/01/when-will-ethereum-sta...
    - meowkit 4y ago
      Issues has a negative connotation. Staking withdrawals were >intentionally< not enabled to give the system more stability in the short term. Unstaking, in a FIFO manner, has a roadmap you can read about with a quick web search.
      - Nursie 4y ago
        OK but AFAICT there has been some upset about how long it's taking, and the withdrawal of the timetable for this? https://cointelegraph.com/news/ether-staking-withdrawal-schedule-removal-faces-harsh-criticism https://cointelegraph.com/news/ether-staking-withdrawal-sche... Perhaps I'm wrong and it's all been sorted out now. As a die-hard crypto sceptic I'm not always the best informed, but I am happy that the energy usage has been addressed.
wittyusername 4y ago
I like the guy, he seems like a genuine technologist / hacker. I wish him well. None of the things he has worked on are any good so far. Objectively nobody actually uses this stuff. My definition: nobody would choose this stuff at arms length from a financial interest in pretending it is the correct technological + business choice.
- thefounder 4y ago
  I thought ICOs had a chance to help small projects but unfortunately they became the worst of crypto. I don't blame the technology though. It's the "investors/ponzi hungers" that blew it.
  - lottin 4y ago
    It's inseparable from the technology. The technology is about issuing and transferring, and exchanging virtual tokens. This is all it does. And what can you do with virtual tokens? Not much, other than trying to sell them for money. I think Ponzis will always be one of the main use cases, if not the main use case.
- golergka 4y ago
  > Objectively nobody actually uses this stuff. Spoken with a privilege of a first-country citizen with a working banking system. I personally know dozens of people who use crypto for their main purpose: to transact. Without it, they wouldn't have been able to earn their living or have any access to their money.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Ah yes here comes the privilege argument to derail legitimate discourse. You love to see it. Your first approach should be a Wise multi-currency account. Where Wise doesn't work the only thing that makes any sense are stablecoins from a proper issuer, like USDC (definitely not USDT). These are of course issued and controlled by centralized entities, making them antithetical to the very principles of crypto. They may as well be private scrip CBDCs. Any decentralized/floating-rate coins are utter garbage for folks without access to meaningful banking systems in so-called third-world countries due to the volatility, embedded systemic leverage, high fees and potential long transaction times. These folks are the least able to stomach the 90% drawdowns (and 100% rug-pulls) we've seen market-wide. Frankly, I think the Turkish Lira has outperformed every major cryptocurrency for the last year. What these people need are actual privacy-preserving CBDCs, of which there are exactly zero in the market. Please put away the faux privilege defense. Folks of any level of privilege are able to comment meaningfully on the fitness of a technical system for purpose. Allow their arguments to stand on their own merits.
remorses 4y ago
Can’t someone just make a MasterCard/Visa alternative sufficiently decentralized and costing 1 cent per transaction? All this blockchain stuff didn’t solve any actual problem, we are still paying fees to a duopoly for basically all global payments We really need something better, in Italy for example the gov removed sanctions for people not accepting credit cards, one reason being Visa fees, if there was an actual alternative we would use it
- species9606 4y ago
  That would be terrific, certainly. MC and Visa fees in the US are outrageous, though Congress seems to finally be taking a look at this. I wonder, though, if there’s an inevitable tradeoff between efficiency and decentralization? The credit card companies are highly centralized, but their services are so efficient and reliable that they’re practically invisible.
  - senttoschool 4y ago
    Yes. Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878216#33878459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878216#33878459
- hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
  At this point it isn't a technology problem but a business problem. The tech exists, but how do you get everyone to adopt it? I genuinely wish I knew!
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  What happens to transaction cost when (if) any of these irreversible decentralized crypto based payment methods hit the real world at any anything approaching mass adoption for things other than a darknet marketplace where the transactions are typically illegal in the first place and obviously don't have any concept of "fraud protection"? What I'm getting at here is the reality of the real world - fraud. Visa, MC, etc have had zero liability for fraudulent transactions since forever at this point. I understand that chargebacks can be an issue for sellers but the fact remains that most of the fraud in the space is by sellers, stolen cards/credentials, etc. Consumer fraud liability was initially legislated by the US and capped at $50 (max) way back in 1978. Consumers (who have significantly more exposure, numbers, political capital, sway, etc) have benefited from these protections for decades and they simply won't accept going back to the days of "sorry the merchant ripped you off, sorry your card/credentials/etc were stolen, etc - you're SOL, your money is gone, and you have no recourse". On twitter, crypto forums, etc (the only place to go when these realities hit with crypto) these victims get a very helpful "hope you learned your lesson"! These costs are baked in to the merchant fees, transaction fees, etc. For merchants, the occasional chargeback (valid or not) is also baked into the "cost of doing business" just like all other forms of shrinkage (employee theft/fraud, shoplifting at physical locations, etc). Many of them (like Amazon, I believe) have terms that essentially say "Ok we're bound by law/Visa/MC/etc and you can do a chargeback but we have an internal process for these kinds of things and if you bring the hammer of a chargeback we'll ban you from our marketplace". The (potential) issues surrounding that approach are left for another discussion... I'm not advocating for Visa, MC, etc and there absolutely are very real problems with them. However, this goes back to an observed issue with crypto - that the crypto ecosystem is running towards replacing our current imperfect system with one (that appears) to be even worse right out of the gates.
nailer 4y ago
> 3. The identity ecosystem: ENS SNS / ENS etc aren't identity, they're naming. Much like DNS, many names correspond to someone different than what most people would associate with that name. Disclaimer: I work in the identity so may be biased.
- cypress66 4y ago
  If you have nailer@gmail.com, then that can be your online identity that you use to authenticate across multiple services. The same can happen with nailer.eth (you authenticate via signing a message).
  - nailer 4y ago
    Someone else can register `nailer.eth` and promote that address as being associated with me too. Also personally, people that send me money (using the first example of utility from the article) want to send it to Mike MacCana.
- ryan29 4y ago
  Domains are a type of identity. For example, a domain can be the identity of a company brand, which is valuable, without it being a specific person. > When I log on to Blockscan chat, I sign in with Ethereum. This means that I am immediately visible as vitalik.eth (my ENS name) to anyone I chat with. In the future, to fight spam, Blockscan chat could "verify" accounts by looking at on-chain activity or POAPs. Imagine that same idea, but with traditional domains and support on major platforms. I've wanted domain validated/verified identities for as long as I can remember. Imagine being able to use your domain name as a handle, with instant reputation/recognition, on all major platforms: twitter.com/@example.net youtube.com/@example.net If you decentralize identity and reputation by tying it to a domain name rather than an identity provider like Facebook or Google, it creates opportunities around all of the things he mentions in the article. Attestations are the most interesting in my opinion.
- bo1024 4y ago
  If you're interested in the details, you should read the section of the blog post related to this.
hiq 4y ago
> many new applications have limited use today due to limitations in tech The Ethereum foundation has been focusing on technical problems since its inception, and your conclusion has always been the official motto: once we solve the "technical problems", users will come. But there will always be technical problems, and as each year passes with still no meaningful democratization of this tech, it's becoming doubtful that these limitations are the real issue. Applications such as decentralized finance are only as interesting as the tokens they allow users to trade, but in turn these tokens are either shady (the world of FTT, USDT, etc.) or legal (requiring KYC, AML, etc.) so just like traditional finance. Once the former have fallen enough in disgrace, it's unclear what benefit there is to trade the latter (centralized tokens) on decentralized platforms. It's easy to stack layers of abstractions, thinking the next one will be the one gathering users, and focusing on what we think is the last technical hurdle before mass adoption. After the 3rd or 4th iteration, one could start asking: what makes you think it'll make a difference this time? Not much has changed since ICOs: same kind of ambitious claims with very little to show for it years after.
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  One example of things that have changed is zero knowledge roll ups. When I first used ethereum, transacting with it was free and fairly quick. The QR code approach meant that it was easier, faster, cheaper and safer to transfer money with it than with my bank account. That changed dramatically for the worse once the systems started getting popular (and traditional banks upped their game too). With L2 systems like zksync, we're back to cheap and fast, and we don't have to give up the central security properties. Another example of something that has changed for ethereum is Proof Of Stake. Some years ago, I worked for a large financial organisation, and we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain. Given the organisations eco aspirations, using a POW based system was never going to be acceptable. Now that ethereum is on Proof Of Stake, it's actually conceivable that these kinds of applications could be deployed by large financial institutions.
  - hiq 4y ago
    > we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain If anything, large financial institutions have by now realized that they're not interested in public blockchains[0], one notable example as of late being the Australian Securities Exchange[1]. These technical improvements are a bit as if a salesman reduced the price of a product, on top of free delivery. That's nice, sure, but that doesn't mean you need the product any more than before. There are more fundamental reasons why smart contracts are not widely used, and they're not addressed by these technical improvements. [0]: as defined in https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_good_reaso.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... [1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-securities-exchange-cut-up-200-jobs-blockchain-project-2022-12-02/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-securities-exc...
fergie 4y ago
I'm not sure if I totally believe that this article was organically promoted to the front page of HN.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  The other articles making the front page were not "organically" promoted either. Everyone games the system.
- flooow 4y ago
  I believe there is a small but persistent contingent who would very much like HN to care about cryptocurrency, because HN is very influential among developers and would lend them much-needed credibility. They may or may not be co-ordinating but I don't think that would be necessary to get this onto the front page. What I have noticed is, when crypto has one of its periodic disasters (e.g. collapse of FTX) the comments are generally highly sceptical of the technology, in keeping with the general tone of HN. But occasionally 'good news' articles like this one get boosted and then the top comments are of notably different tone. For example, comments praising Vitalik, a presumed billionaire with unknown motives, dubious achievements and a unspeakably enormous environmental toll against his name, would be very unusual in any other thread.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I'm one of the HN users who upvotes (some) cryptocurrency-related topics. I work in the industry, and enjoy reading about technical things that I find interesting. I upvote many other topics, and crypto-related submissions are definitely a minority. But I upvote what I find interesting, much like you or any other user would upvote what you find interesting. Obviously, there are many people on HN who don't find crypto-related topics interesting (or who only enjoy submissions about crypto-related businesses and projects blowing up, of which there is no shortage). I don't think there is a conspiracy here; if anything, I think you underestimate the number of developers who are primarily interested in the technical aspects of blockchain tech. Also, the things Vitalik posts about are often interesting even to people who generally dislike or aren't interested in cryptocurrency.
  - 4y ago
lavventura 4y ago
Only thing that drives Ethereum application ecosystem to allow people to gain and ofcourse to lose money. If Ethereum was not attached to financial interest the project would not grow. I believe the ecosystem and everything, it's all a scam. The platform, new emerging projects, all ads are serving exchanges to liquadate people and gain money and destroy their lives.
- stiltzkin 4y ago
  The traditional financial system also allow people to gain and lose money, even the U.S. central bank prints money out of air to support wars and loan money to banks.
college_physics 4y ago
ether was a popular concept before Einstein and special relativity but we have discovered since that is actually not needed. just saying :-p
jqpabc123 4y ago
the stablecoins that are most successful today are the centralized ones, mostly USDC, USDT and BUSD. The current crypto market proves one thing --- decentralization is a fantasy, a myth that has yet to be successfully implemented. Remember the golden rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules. In the crypto market, the rulers are the *centralized* exchanges. Centralized exchanges (CEX) have tremendous influence and control over the crypto market just like a central bank. They achieve this by the sheer weight of their trading volume --- and their unrestricted ability to mint stable coins and use them to manipulate the market as they see fit --- just like a central bank with one big difference --- without any transparency or oversight. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In real world practice, even so-called decentralized peer to peer exchanges still follow the trading prices set by the centralized exchanges. Don't take my word for it --- just try buying or selling coins on a DEX for a price that differs significantly from the current CEX rate. It may be possible in theory but in reality, it's highly unlikely. Most reasonable people won't surrender value just for the sake of decentralization.
- yunohn 4y ago
  I actually know a few crypto enthusiasts who claim to use DEXes. When pressed further, you realise that it’s to avoid KYC/AML and taxes, not for decentralization principles…
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    In other words, "decentralization" is just a talking/selling point that evaporates on closer inspection down where the rubber really meets the road in the crypto market. By going all crypto, you're rejecting fiat central bankers with some transparency and oversight in favor of crypto central bankers who have none.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      For crypto people, the problem with 2008 wasn't that big banks got bailed out on tax payer's dime, the problem is that they as individuals weren't the ones getting the bailout
leashless 4y ago
Here is a Boston Consulting Group report which suggests that tokenised real assets - various kinds of equity, mostly - transacted on chain will amount to $16 trillion a year of transactions by 2030. https://web-assets.bcg.com/1e/a2/5b5f2b7e42dfad2cb3113a291222/on-chain-asset-tokenization.pdf https://web-assets.bcg.com/1e/a2/5b5f2b7e42dfad2cb3113a29122... Recognition of on-chain tokenization by monetary authorities: The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)22 recently launched Project Guardian, a blockchain-based asset tokenization pilot, in collaboration with financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, DBS Bank and Marketnode (SGX joint venture for bonds). The project will involve MAS investigating DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets by creating a liquidity pool of tokenized bonds and deposits to execute borrowing and lending on a public blockchain- based network. In wholesale banking activities, DBS and JP Morgan have both developed digital assets and blockchain technology. Lessons from this project would serve as foundation for informing policy markets on the regulatory guardrails required to use DeFi while also limiting its risks. (quote ends)
- rippercushions 4y ago
  That report predates the Singapore state investment fund Temasek realizing their investment of $275M into FTX had been lit on fire and burned to ashes, an event that has resulted in awkward questions being asked even in Singapore's pliable Parliament. MAS has been bearish on crypto for a while and you can rest assured this has not improved their outlook.
  - leashless 4y ago
    Real World Assets over crypto are not the same as crypto. Not at all. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/at-the-turning-point-how-crypto-interacts-with-real-world-assets-b4bf3c4b217c https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/at-the-turning...
snarf21 4y ago
Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others. Saying stuff like "supply chain apps" is a key application at the same time global supply chain apps on the blockchain are getting shutdown. The only use case of blockchain is coins and those are merely unregulated pump-and-dump. Bitcoin was an interesting thought experiment but the probably is that you need it to be profitable for individual miners (minus pools) to drive true decentralization and as soon as that is true, economies of scale will win and there will be a drive to centralization.
- haakonhr 4y ago
  He actually links to the recent Maersk/IBM supply chain blockchain shutdown in the introduction, even though he mentions supply chains again later on
- x-complexity 4y ago
  > Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others. It comes from a techno-optimist perspective that attempts should still be made to see if it could be solved in the first place. The binary alternative is a nihilistic "don't ever try" mindset, wherein the Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, & Joseph Fourier shouldn't ever try to solve existing problems, and that they should just toil in misery like the rest of us. There definitely exists gradients in between the two, but it's worrying that HN, a supposed place of hackers/experimentalists, is adopting a more "this'll never work" stance over time. The Dropbox negativity was the popular start of this downtrend, & I fear it's getting worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  - csomar 4y ago
    I think most people concerns about crypto is either the scam (of other people) or the potential displacement of the system they are part of (which will cause its fall and a loss to them/it's a zero-sum game). Both of these are valid concerns. What I am wondering, however, is if this scamming/pumping money will eventually make a legitimate industry. Many industries/technologies have started out of that (Military, Gambling, Sex, etc...)
matthewdgreen 4y ago
It is not a very impressive list of future technologies for the year 2022, unfortunately. I don't mean this as shade: I just mean that most of these are older ideas that have either been deployed or attempted (with limited success.) Clearly money and DeFi are already real and well-established things, whether they're "going great" is in the eye of the beholder. DAOs have been around for a while, and the main examples Vitalik lists are basically DeFi apps that call themselves DAOs. General-purpose DAOs that have real-world influence remain questionable things, mostly because they have too many human and legal dependencies. On-chain identity might be exciting. NFTs might eventually prove to have exciting real applications beyond apes. Blockchain voting remains an old idea that doesn't have much real benefit outside of DeFi project governance.
LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago
So once again, there are no problems crypto claims to solve that haven't already been solved already.
- buzzert 4y ago
  Can you give one example? How was something like ENS (Ethereum Name Service) solved already, in a truly decentralized way?
  - LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago
    I don't really understand ENS at all, but is it not just DNS for Ethereum addresses and NFTs and whatnot?
Proven 4y ago
rhaway84773 4y ago
> cash-like respect for personal privacy. This is false. If I go out on a date and my date sends me money on chain, I now know their public key and can look up every past and future transaction they make. If they send me cash there’s no way the cash will help me do that. Heck, even Venmo has protections against that.
- dagmx 4y ago
  Yes, I think many crypto fans conflate anonymity and privacy. however like any anonymous system, once your identity has been associated externally, you lose the privacy garnered by it. The argument would be then to create many burner wallets but that’s also not exactly scalable unless you’re transferring between them off the chain to avoid gas fees.
- DennisP 4y ago
  There's a system on Ethereum that does protect against that, but US regulators just sanctioned it.
- capableweb 4y ago
  You would have been able to use something like Tornado Cash outside of the US in order to conceal previous/future transactions from people you interact with. The US has decided that's illegal. Not sure what Ethereum could do about that. zCash and similar cryptocurrencies take a different stand where transactions can be "shielded" and anonymous.
  - LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago
    Surprise, surprise! Money laundering is illegal!
    - capableweb 4y ago
      If you think wanting to hide previous/future transactions from other private entities is money laundering and illegal, I think you need to re-educate yourself on how that stuff works. Money laundering is trying to hide the source or nature of illegal activities. Privacy in itself is not illegal nor money laundering.
PaulHoule 4y ago
What I think is funny is that in light of recent events people seem to have entirely forgotten that Ethereum seems to have made the transition to proof-of-stake successfully. This removes one major objection people have to crypto (it doesn't necessarily bake the planet anymore) but still leaves a network that performs like a "TRS-80 with a coin slot attached".
- DennisP 4y ago
  Scaling is the next major effort. It's not an easy problem but probably easier than proof-of-stake was.
mikhael28 4y ago
'Global reach', yeah in Argentina which is the most economically dysfunctional country in Capitalist history. That's like saying you are proud of the global reach of synthetic drugs at a nightclub in Bristol - it's there because the people there need it to have a good time. People in the rich, developed world don't need crypto - you won't find as many synthetic drugs at an insurance agents office, because the people there don't need them in their daily lives.
unboxingelf 4y ago
If his number one focus is solving money he should start promoting Bitcoin and Lightning.
madelyn-goodman 4y ago
"The identity ecosystem" he describes is most exciting to me. There is so much that can be attached to our on-chain identity beyond just our net worth and jpegs. This year the first house was sold on-chain, and I believe that's just the beginning of these immutable irl transactions.
aaroninsf 4y ago
It is hard to read this list objectively and not conclude immediately that while "limited use" "don't scale" "slow" and "privacy issues" are hypothetically solvable(?), the divergence between investment and expectation and reality is exactly as great as critics assert, and that it is indeed entirely the energy and momentum of greed and grift that keeps this from collapsing back to its natural state, one I was close to prior to the grift, when the technological challenges and approaches were collectively known as "the decentralized internet" and there was not dirty, funny, fake, and stolen money fueling a narcissistic crime carnival.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"All solvable problems." Let us know when they have been solved. Having been on the web since it went public, there has always been a disproportionate amount of prophetic messaging and discourse, not to mention advertising, focused on computers. More often than not, the predictions are wrong. Of course, sometimes, perhaps most of the time, the discussion is "hype" and serves a commercial purpose. One can expect those spreading computer hype will keep trying even when it has a low success rate. The www is an inexpensive medium for advertising and spreading hype.
kevinak 4y ago
I wonder if people around here know that Vitalik tried scamming people with a "quantum computer simulation mining" thing back in 2013? Amazing that more people aren't more vary of him. 1. https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e6af6570f23 https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e... 2. https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1273353652447608834 https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1273353652447608834 3. YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkUpZkeqhF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkUpZkeqhF4
- samkon 4y ago
  Considering that he was 19 at the time, and that he dropped that project soon after, I think a more charitable reading is that a teenager with some big ideas did something unwise.
didibus 4y ago
The fundamental idea of implementing a cash-like currency digitally still makes sense to me. We've digitized almost everything, doing so with currency makes sense. But the benefits of digitization are normally that it offers something better, generally higher scale, lower cost, easier use, less hassle, faster, better analytics, or other benefits over it's analog version. The truth is, crypto hasn't done so yet, so the tech just isn't there quite yet. There are some benefits over analog, mostly anonymity and lesser scrutiny. And I guess you could include investment bubble as a weird benefit right now. Maybe also easy to use for scams and Ponzi schemes. The thing is, those on their own aren't able to attract a large user base, it'll attract people who specifically want these properties, which is not most people. Eventually, I hope the tech improves, and when that happens and digital currency is truly cheaper and more convenient to use, while retaining all the benefit of analog currencies, like decentralization, point to point transactions, anonymity, etc. And also maybe adding a global non government tied currency to the mix. That's when I think it'll truly be impactful and you'll see crypto adopted by everyone.
- baby 4y ago
  > But the benefits of digitization are normally that it offers something better, generally higher scale, lower cost, easier use, less hassle, faster, better analytics, or other benefits over it's analog version. > The truth is, crypto hasn't done so yet, so the tech just isn't there quite yet. How do you know this BTW? What are your criterias? If you're considering integration of money, the way your bank issues you a debit/credit card, and allows you to pay at point of sale throughout the world, you're talking about something else: integration. This takes a lot of time and money. If you're talking about running a central bank that's covering the entire world, is easy to interoperate with (anyone can connect to the network and use it), is easy to build on top with (via smart contracts), and costs an infinitely smaller percentage of what it costs to run the financial world today to run? Then I would say that Ethereum and other state-of-the-art blockchains are already winning. The issue is that if someone doesn't work in the financial world, their metrics are not good to understand how to judge and compare different financial backbones.
- lovvtide 4y ago
  All the speculation stuff is a very wasteful distraction in my opinion. In my opinion, the goal should be a currency that is: 1) Privacy preserving 2) Scaleable (to billions of transactions per second) 3) Permissionless (global and free from government interference) 4) Stable (can function as a unit of account, not an investment vehicle) The last one seems like the hardest because it's not just an engineering problem, it's also a political problem.
throwaway4837 4y ago
Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. "Proof of humanity" in theory is cool, but humans can be bought. Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. Even if unique brain patterns becomes the decentralization key, nothing stops two unique people from colluding and voting in the same direction. Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person. I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.
- x-complexity 4y ago
  > Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. "Proof of humanity" in theory is cool, but humans can be bought. Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. Even if unique brain patterns becomes the decentralization key, nothing stops two unique people from colluding and voting in the same direction. Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person. > I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely. ---------- > Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. > Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. > It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. > Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person. > Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. > This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. > There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely. The parent comment is likely right, but it's engaging in a "it's not 100% perfect, so it's useless" fallacy: Just because we can't get 100% of the way there doesn't mean that the effort shouldn't be done in the first place. The Bittorrent protocol is a good example of this, as the protocol's not perfect either, relying on centralized trackers for fast peering. Still, that didn't mean that the protocol couldn't improve, with Mainline DHT eventually being developed for the protocol. Even though it's still slower than a centralized tracker, it does its assigned job well & to great success. Were such a viewpoint to be transplanted towards the Bittorrent protocol before DHT's creation, the parent would've likely viewed trackers to be "un-decentralizable" & therefore a waste of time. Attempts at decentralizing trackers would've been seen as a futile effort, as "they'll never be as efficient as centralized trackers". In general, no working system is ever 100% perfect, so why is such an attitude still being projected upon all open-source projects? It's likely that 100% decentralization will never be achieved, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't aim for at least 50%. The alternative is a nihilistic "we'll always need centralization" dystopia, & that fundamentally doesn't sit well with me all.
Octokiddie 4y ago
> Money: the first and still most important app Money is also the thing that will continue to be problematic for Ethereum going forward. Two technical problems drive this: 1. Scalability issues related to a very large block chain size and the associated difficulty in bringing up and running a full node. 2. The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is driving the convergence of validators and exchanges. (1) drives individuals increasingly into the arms of gatekeepers to tell them what's "on the block chain" rather than directly participating on the network. (2) degrades what little censorship resistance Ethereum may have once had.
- x-complexity 4y ago
  > 1. Scalability issues related to a very large block chain size and the associated difficulty in bringing up and running a full node. This is a problem of 2 parts: Transaction scalability & Storage scalability. Transaction scalability's currently being resolved with various optimistic & zk-based rollup solutions, with the latter rolling out next year (zkSync 2.0, Scroll, & Polygon Zero & Miden) and the former already being improved upon & decentralized (Optimism & Arbitrum). There are still guardrails in place, as they're still being developed/improved on. https://l2beat.com/scaling/risk https://l2beat.com/scaling/risk Storage scalability's a different issue that's also being worked on via data availability (DA) sampling, whereby the use of erasure codes & random sampling allows for data to be split into chunks & distributed amongst the network. With this system, every node doesn't need to hold onto all of the data: The whole network only needs to provide at least 51-99% (depending on the erasure code used) of the chunks to reconstruct the block, verify, & republish the block for everyone else. By doing so, the average case for a node is reduced from "store all data" to "store 1/n of all data", with N being the number of data shards for the entire network. Another way that's being worked on is the creation of Validium rollups, wherein the data is stored off-chain but it can still be proven via proofs published on-chain. It's not as secure as a fully on-chain rollup, but in return, the rollup consumes significantly less gas. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1588669782471368704 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/158866978247136870... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgwVhUjaAAEx_Bb?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgwVhUjaAAEx_Bb?format=jpg&name=...
- x-complexity 4y ago

333 points by anonu 4y ago

My summary on Vitalik's ETH application ecosystem outlook. 5 key application categories: 1. Money. Post-merge transactions are now faster. bigger push towards on-chain transactions thanks to FTX. 3 types of stablecoins: centralized, DAO-governed, and governance-minimized. 2. DEFI: success today in prediction markets like Augur, Metaculus, Polymarket. Synthetic assets like replicating stocks. Glue layer to trade between assets. 3. The identity ecosystem: ENS, SIWE (Sign in With Ethereum), PoH (Proof of Humanity), POAPs (Proof of Attendance Protocol), SBTs. 3 main uses: Basic Auth, Attestations, Proof of personhood. Privacy is the biggest challenge. 4. DAOs. Broad term today referring to both governance structure (protecting against inside attacks) and implementation (protecting against outside attacks). Decentralization is for robustness, efficiency, interoperability. New governance mechanisms like quadratic voting, futarchy, liquid democracy can be valuable for both robustness and efficiency. 5. Hybrid apps: voting, govt registries, corporate accounting, supply chain apps, tracking access auth. In conclusion: many new applications have limited use today due to limitations in tech. Blockchains don't scale and transactions are slow. Privacy issues will remain a hurdle. All solvable problems. Most important apps will be non-financial and not have a token which will make them slow to grow - but will bring lasting value to users.

m3kw9 4y ago
Was this summary brought to us by ChatGPT?

senttoschool 4y ago

In blockchain, choose 2/3: security, performance, decentralization. BTC = security, decentralization ETH PoW = security, decentralization ETH PoS = security, performance It also applies to real world tech. For example, Visa is performance and security. This means if Bitcoin or ETH ever wants to process as many transactions as Visa, it'll slowly morph into a centralized Oracle database.

solumunus 4y ago
You choose security and decentralization for the main chain and then use layer 2 for performance. This is the clear path forward, pretty well established by now.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  So you can securely prove that your centralized and insecure layer 2 has indeed transfered all of your money away to them? Great plan.
  - miracle2k 4y ago
    No, the layer 2 inherits the trust-assumptions and security of the L1.
    - lawn 4y ago
      This is ridiculos and false. For instance, with LN you have to be online to secure your funds, otherwise you might lose them. L2 only inherits the security of L1 when it settles, which by definition is not that often (that's the whole point!).
      - DennisP 4y ago
        LN's shortcomings are not issues for zkrollups on Ethereum. Transactions are stored on chain, just in compressed form. A contract checks the validity of all transactions before storing them. The proofs are expensive to generate, but so cheap to verify that a contract can do it on chain.
      - everfree 4y ago
        Some types of L2, like roll-ups, settle to L1 every block. The "whole point" of L2 is to reduce the amount of resources used to settle its transactions on L1. Some L2s, like Lightning Network, achieve this by settling infrequently. But other L2s, like roll-ups, achieve it by batching transactions in clever ways so that less L1 resources are used on a per-transaction basis.

mattlondon 4y ago

I don't see how privacy can ever be solved with blockchain. By design, everything you ever do is permanently out in the open for ever and ever for anyone to not only see what you did, but mathematically prove that it was you (well, your key at least) that did it. Sure you can be "anonymous" when using your wallet etc, but as we all know it is usually trivial to de-anonymize large data sets. Likewise, being anonymous when using a wallet then removes a lot of the perceived value of using it for identity verification (e.g. sign-ins, proof of humanity etc).

leashless 4y ago
See https://docs.zksync.io/zkevm/#what-is-zkevm-and-why-is-this-a-big-deal https://docs.zksync.io/zkevm/#what-is-zkevm-and-why-is-this-... Basically you can make transactions anonymous using much the same kind of protection as you have between public and private keys. There is a proof the transaction is valid but that is basically all you can see.
- JofArnold 4y ago
  Sounds like a good idea. Until, like Tornado, the tech gets sanctioned.
  - camgunz 4y ago
    I feel like your downvotes are undeserved. From an engineering perspective, all Tornado did was add anonymity/plausible deniability to the blockchain--which is all that ZK will do. Maybe there's a question as to whether OFEC will also see ZK as money laundering, but my guess is they won't until it gets to a certain scale and then they will--exactly like Tornado. That limit was ~$7 billion, which is < 1 FTX, and far smaller than the current market cap of Ethereum.
  - audunw 4y ago
    Yeah, I feel like cryptocurrencies only have a chance of providing value to some users if it's not actually very succesfull. - If it's successful in providing anonymous transactions to everyone: Regulated to death due to laws aimed at combating money laundering and organized crimes. Even cryptocurrencies that aren't perfectly anonymous will probably eventually be regulated to death for not providing good enough guarantees about the identity of the wallet holders. - If it threatens the Eurodollar as a world reserve currency: regulated to death at least in USA and probably Europe. In what scenario can cryptocurrencies actually achieve its goals without risking being regulated to death? And yes, I know you can't effectively ban all trade of cryptocurrencies. But trade will always be a niche if most people can't use it in the real world.

johnnymorgan 4y ago

Holy crap, Augur is still going! Amazing, they are an OG of the first wave of ICO token..good to see them still operating. I've stayed out of it the last few years and just maintained a high view of the market. It seemed obvious to me this was all going to blow up, sad about BlockFi but once I saw them ink the FTX deal I knew they were done. Too soon for that play... The story of Crypto!

negamax 4y ago
They took a lion's share of money and Augur creator now runs an investment fund. They weren't successfully in the sense, people successfully gamed the outcome
- spir 4y ago
  this is true. Augur is not a success story. It's a story of mismanagement, legal "embezzlement" of tens of millions of dollars due to lack of legal safeguards, and squandering of the opportunity to build a truly great prediction market platform.

leashless 4y ago

We're building on Ethereum. Live projects for customers for 18 months. The product is an NFT which gives you legal ownership of an underlying physical object when you buy it. An individually numbered bar of gold in a vault. A scarce collectible. Real estate. The real estate thing is interesting: transfer time goes down from around 4 months in the UK to a couple of days. The only delay is the KYCAMLCTFPEPOFACT checking: if that's done as a pre-clearing step the transfer of real estate will be instantaneous. It took several years to build this capability. The blockchain is not done. http://mattereum.com/land http://mattereum.com/land

RandomLensman 4y ago
As I don't know how it works in the UK: is there no registry where ownership of land is being held or can that already be edited/updated in real time to transfer real estate?
- chrisbaker98 4y ago
  Yes, there is: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/land-registry https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/land-registry
  - leashless 4y ago
    The issue is the conveyancing process as a whole. It's extremely slow and expensive.
bjelkeman-again 4y ago
Having bought and sold property in the UK and comparing it to Sweden, for example, then I can only say that the UK process is archaic and incredibly cumbersome. So this is a very interesting place to improve the process. If you can get the legal process to stick and not end up with some edgecase situations where people end up losing their right to the property, this I think could be of real value to the UK. Disclosure: I have known @leashless since way before Ethereum.

skilled 4y ago

Is Vitalik like the one sane guy in crypto that doesn't actually try to be a bro and simply has an idea of his destiny and is living through it? I don't follow crypto almost at all, and HN/Twitter are probably the only two places where I will ever hear about it. I don't know him personally but from what I have seen - Vitalik has a lot of great qualities as a person (even outside of crypto, he makes good points on society), and when he does share his thoughts on crypto, it comes off as non-invasive, just ideas and plans that make sense and could be implemented in a way that doesn't push people around. Who else in crypto does this?

unpopularopp 4y ago
>Is Vitalik like the one sane guy in crypto In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King
fukthat 4y ago
Vitalik looks good in a field shit. Don't forget Vitalik bro behavior caused the ETH and ETH Classic split - the DAO valid transaction that was meant to be immutable all of a sudden was reversed as in Slack (or was it IRC?) as king and controlling Vitalik said jump and everyone (or at least 60% of the decentralized network of friends) said how high - this then mapped to the ETH Classic split and all sorts of meta discussions but but but well he took control because he was acting in the greater good and therefore the miners acted in greater good as by design so we're still cool and kinda of immutable right? ... right? - fuck that sillyness. Do you believe this dog shit any more than SBF being innocent? Has this got better with PoS - I don't know but would be interested in hearing?
127 4y ago
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mypastself 4y ago
I feel it’s almost a shame he isn’t utilizing his intellect and thoughtfulness in a domain more obviously useful for humanity, but he might have just gone to sell ads for a FAANG if he weren’t a crypto pioneer. Also, even as someone who’s dabbled in the space and found it lacking in many areas, I can’t say with any degree of certainty that there’s no future in his particular flavor of the blockchain technology.

galfarragem 4y ago

Ethereum's main competitive advantage is having a leader like Vitalik. Another leader but an order of magnitude less known is Andre Cronje from Fantom. It worths a read (so much transparency in a crypto company is unusual): https://andrecronje.medium.com/fantom-an-inside-financial-peak-at-being-a-crypto-company-323d29fb5e81 https://andrecronje.medium.com/fantom-an-inside-financial-pe...

dylkil 4y ago
Andre is pretty much hated now. He created a shit ton of useless tokens in 2020 and 2021, made multiple millions off them, disappeared, and now has come back to preach to word of regulation to prevent others doing what he got away it.
- practice9 4y ago
  While Cronje may be a good developer, he is also close to SBF level of scam (and he's more clever). He also knowingly associated with Omar Dhanani / 0xSifu / Michael Patryn, who is another scammer who served time in US prison
anonporridge 4y ago
But also, one of Ethereum's biggest risks is having a leader. Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation are a dangerous point of centralization that at least expose it to risk of harsher regulation in the near future for years operating as an unregistered security. The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity. Beyond the governmental risk of Ethereum having a clear head with a throat to choke, there's the simple "hit by a bus" risk. Vitalik is just a single human, and his unexpected death could lead to a massive collapse of confidence from both investors and developers who have other options. It wouldn't completely die with him, but it would be a major setback, because the cult of Vitalik is a not insignificant part of Ethereum.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > The SEC has already hinted at this, while the CFTC has indicated that only bitcoin is likely to be regulated as a commodity. I think any token that gains enough prominence in the market is going to eventually fall under government purview. Why? Because when financial crime happens, victims want the government to go after the criminals and recover their lost funds. Crypto fans can't have it both ways: if their goal is to create a financial system that lives entirely outside of government control, then they shouldn't reasonably rely on the government to go after the criminals bringing the entire crypto space down. The reason that the government winds up stepping in is because the chaos and instability created by this completely unregulated side-chain financial system winds up threatening the Federally backed system as well. Market contagion is real and collapses in one sector or market often reverberate across the entire system. We're seeing it happen in banking right now: a bunch of banks made small business loans to miners that are now underwater because the price of crypto tanked and the GPU market cooled, so their revenue and equipment value has tanked at the same time.

dmitriid 4y ago

> Hybrid apps: voting, govt registries, corporate accounting, supply chain apps, tracking access auth. Yeah, no. Literally none of these benefit from blockchains. Moreover, blockchains make many of these things worse. This was already described eloquently, and with examples, 4 years ago: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... Why are these crypto maximalists still pretending it's a thing?

cle 4y ago
> This was already described eloquently, and with examples, 4 years ago: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... Why are these crypto maximalists still pretending it's a thing? Because they don't agree with those conclusions.
- cto_of_antifa 4y ago
meowkit 4y ago
That author is a dismissive ass - makes it hard to take his points seriously.
TimJRobinson 4y ago
Like most anti-crypto authors he still misses the forest for the trees. Trusting software is better than trusting humans because if the software is immutable you only have to trust it once! I don't know why so many people don't get this. When you trust human systems you have to keep trusting them forever, because humans are fickle and could decide to screw you at any time.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  For starters, people have figured out how to run pretty solid and stable elections for while without needing anything but most basic technology. Also, if you have a society where no-one trust anyone, no amount of software will fix that. People can then just not accept the result of software and do what they please. Immutability is totally irrelevant at that point.

alex_suzuki 4y ago

You’d be hard-pressed to find a coffee shop around here that accepts ETH. I’m sure there’s a significant number of individuals that would know how to accept a crypto payment, but shops, small businesses, that have accounting requirements… I’m skeptical. Disclaimer: I hold ETH.

conorcleary 4y ago
Shopify has crypto-accepting methods of payments
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Awesome. Now my coffee is available at a random cost. If I just forgo the coffee it's cloth in crypto tomorrow might be able to buy me a PS5. What a wonderful system!
  - csisnett 4y ago
    When you pay with crypto you get a price in crypto and a time to pay it. Is not a random cost you know how much you have to pay
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      The dollar value of that crypto price is variable. Even if the price in crypto constantly updates, the cost to you in dollars is always in flux. For no discernible reason a cryptocoin can fluctuate in value. Today one coin will buy a coffee while tomorrow one coin will buy a PS5. There's no incentive to transact with crypto if there's any assumption the value of that crypto will go up tomorrow. For a seller they can get wiped out if they accepted payment for coffee in crypto and then the value of that coin tanks. Knowing the crypto price is immaterial. You can never know what the value of the item will be. It's like paying for everything with lottery tickets.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago

bilsbie 4y ago

As a casual observer I never got an update on PoS. How’s that going?

v64 4y ago
The transition to proof of stake occurred in September [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/15/ethereum-switches-to-proof-of-stake-consensus-after-completing-the-merge/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/15/ethereum-switches-to-proof...
- Nursie 4y ago
  But IIRC there are issues with un-staking? Definitely a big leap forward in terms of reducing energy use.
  - v64 4y ago
    EIP-4895 [1] will enable beacon chain withdrawals and will be included in the next Ethereum upgrade scheduled for next year. No actual release date has been decided yet [2]. [1] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4895 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4895 [2] https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/12/01/when-will-ethereum-stakers-be-able-to-withdraw-their-funds-heres-what-we-know-so-far/ https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/12/01/when-will-ethereum-sta...
  - meowkit 4y ago
    Issues has a negative connotation. Staking withdrawals were >intentionally< not enabled to give the system more stability in the short term. Unstaking, in a FIFO manner, has a roadmap you can read about with a quick web search.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      OK but AFAICT there has been some upset about how long it's taking, and the withdrawal of the timetable for this? https://cointelegraph.com/news/ether-staking-withdrawal-schedule-removal-faces-harsh-criticism https://cointelegraph.com/news/ether-staking-withdrawal-sche... Perhaps I'm wrong and it's all been sorted out now. As a die-hard crypto sceptic I'm not always the best informed, but I am happy that the energy usage has been addressed.

wittyusername 4y ago

I like the guy, he seems like a genuine technologist / hacker. I wish him well. None of the things he has worked on are any good so far. Objectively nobody actually uses this stuff. My definition: nobody would choose this stuff at arms length from a financial interest in pretending it is the correct technological + business choice.

thefounder 4y ago
I thought ICOs had a chance to help small projects but unfortunately they became the worst of crypto. I don't blame the technology though. It's the "investors/ponzi hungers" that blew it.
- lottin 4y ago
  It's inseparable from the technology. The technology is about issuing and transferring, and exchanging virtual tokens. This is all it does. And what can you do with virtual tokens? Not much, other than trying to sell them for money. I think Ponzis will always be one of the main use cases, if not the main use case.
golergka 4y ago
> Objectively nobody actually uses this stuff. Spoken with a privilege of a first-country citizen with a working banking system. I personally know dozens of people who use crypto for their main purpose: to transact. Without it, they wouldn't have been able to earn their living or have any access to their money.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Ah yes here comes the privilege argument to derail legitimate discourse. You love to see it. Your first approach should be a Wise multi-currency account. Where Wise doesn't work the only thing that makes any sense are stablecoins from a proper issuer, like USDC (definitely not USDT). These are of course issued and controlled by centralized entities, making them antithetical to the very principles of crypto. They may as well be private scrip CBDCs. Any decentralized/floating-rate coins are utter garbage for folks without access to meaningful banking systems in so-called third-world countries due to the volatility, embedded systemic leverage, high fees and potential long transaction times. These folks are the least able to stomach the 90% drawdowns (and 100% rug-pulls) we've seen market-wide. Frankly, I think the Turkish Lira has outperformed every major cryptocurrency for the last year. What these people need are actual privacy-preserving CBDCs, of which there are exactly zero in the market. Please put away the faux privilege defense. Folks of any level of privilege are able to comment meaningfully on the fitness of a technical system for purpose. Allow their arguments to stand on their own merits.

remorses 4y ago

Can’t someone just make a MasterCard/Visa alternative sufficiently decentralized and costing 1 cent per transaction? All this blockchain stuff didn’t solve any actual problem, we are still paying fees to a duopoly for basically all global payments We really need something better, in Italy for example the gov removed sanctions for people not accepting credit cards, one reason being Visa fees, if there was an actual alternative we would use it

species9606 4y ago
That would be terrific, certainly. MC and Visa fees in the US are outrageous, though Congress seems to finally be taking a look at this. I wonder, though, if there’s an inevitable tradeoff between efficiency and decentralization? The credit card companies are highly centralized, but their services are so efficient and reliable that they’re practically invisible.
- senttoschool 4y ago
  Yes. Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878216#33878459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878216#33878459
hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
At this point it isn't a technology problem but a business problem. The tech exists, but how do you get everyone to adopt it? I genuinely wish I knew!
kkielhofner 4y ago
What happens to transaction cost when (if) any of these irreversible decentralized crypto based payment methods hit the real world at any anything approaching mass adoption for things other than a darknet marketplace where the transactions are typically illegal in the first place and obviously don't have any concept of "fraud protection"? What I'm getting at here is the reality of the real world - fraud. Visa, MC, etc have had zero liability for fraudulent transactions since forever at this point. I understand that chargebacks can be an issue for sellers but the fact remains that most of the fraud in the space is by sellers, stolen cards/credentials, etc. Consumer fraud liability was initially legislated by the US and capped at $50 (max) way back in 1978. Consumers (who have significantly more exposure, numbers, political capital, sway, etc) have benefited from these protections for decades and they simply won't accept going back to the days of "sorry the merchant ripped you off, sorry your card/credentials/etc were stolen, etc - you're SOL, your money is gone, and you have no recourse". On twitter, crypto forums, etc (the only place to go when these realities hit with crypto) these victims get a very helpful "hope you learned your lesson"! These costs are baked in to the merchant fees, transaction fees, etc. For merchants, the occasional chargeback (valid or not) is also baked into the "cost of doing business" just like all other forms of shrinkage (employee theft/fraud, shoplifting at physical locations, etc). Many of them (like Amazon, I believe) have terms that essentially say "Ok we're bound by law/Visa/MC/etc and you can do a chargeback but we have an internal process for these kinds of things and if you bring the hammer of a chargeback we'll ban you from our marketplace". The (potential) issues surrounding that approach are left for another discussion... I'm not advocating for Visa, MC, etc and there absolutely are very real problems with them. However, this goes back to an observed issue with crypto - that the crypto ecosystem is running towards replacing our current imperfect system with one (that appears) to be even worse right out of the gates.

nailer 4y ago

> 3. The identity ecosystem: ENS SNS / ENS etc aren't identity, they're naming. Much like DNS, many names correspond to someone different than what most people would associate with that name. Disclaimer: I work in the identity so may be biased.

cypress66 4y ago
If you have nailer@gmail.com, then that can be your online identity that you use to authenticate across multiple services. The same can happen with nailer.eth (you authenticate via signing a message).
- nailer 4y ago
  Someone else can register `nailer.eth` and promote that address as being associated with me too. Also personally, people that send me money (using the first example of utility from the article) want to send it to Mike MacCana.
ryan29 4y ago
Domains are a type of identity. For example, a domain can be the identity of a company brand, which is valuable, without it being a specific person. > When I log on to Blockscan chat, I sign in with Ethereum. This means that I am immediately visible as vitalik.eth (my ENS name) to anyone I chat with. In the future, to fight spam, Blockscan chat could "verify" accounts by looking at on-chain activity or POAPs. Imagine that same idea, but with traditional domains and support on major platforms. I've wanted domain validated/verified identities for as long as I can remember. Imagine being able to use your domain name as a handle, with instant reputation/recognition, on all major platforms: twitter.com/@example.net youtube.com/@example.net If you decentralize identity and reputation by tying it to a domain name rather than an identity provider like Facebook or Google, it creates opportunities around all of the things he mentions in the article. Attestations are the most interesting in my opinion.
bo1024 4y ago
If you're interested in the details, you should read the section of the blog post related to this.

hiq 4y ago

> many new applications have limited use today due to limitations in tech The Ethereum foundation has been focusing on technical problems since its inception, and your conclusion has always been the official motto: once we solve the "technical problems", users will come. But there will always be technical problems, and as each year passes with still no meaningful democratization of this tech, it's becoming doubtful that these limitations are the real issue. Applications such as decentralized finance are only as interesting as the tokens they allow users to trade, but in turn these tokens are either shady (the world of FTT, USDT, etc.) or legal (requiring KYC, AML, etc.) so just like traditional finance. Once the former have fallen enough in disgrace, it's unclear what benefit there is to trade the latter (centralized tokens) on decentralized platforms. It's easy to stack layers of abstractions, thinking the next one will be the one gathering users, and focusing on what we think is the last technical hurdle before mass adoption. After the 3rd or 4th iteration, one could start asking: what makes you think it'll make a difference this time? Not much has changed since ICOs: same kind of ambitious claims with very little to show for it years after.

kybernetikos 4y ago
One example of things that have changed is zero knowledge roll ups. When I first used ethereum, transacting with it was free and fairly quick. The QR code approach meant that it was easier, faster, cheaper and safer to transfer money with it than with my bank account. That changed dramatically for the worse once the systems started getting popular (and traditional banks upped their game too). With L2 systems like zksync, we're back to cheap and fast, and we don't have to give up the central security properties. Another example of something that has changed for ethereum is Proof Of Stake. Some years ago, I worked for a large financial organisation, and we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain. Given the organisations eco aspirations, using a POW based system was never going to be acceptable. Now that ethereum is on Proof Of Stake, it's actually conceivable that these kinds of applications could be deployed by large financial institutions.
- hiq 4y ago
  > we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain If anything, large financial institutions have by now realized that they're not interested in public blockchains[0], one notable example as of late being the Australian Securities Exchange[1]. These technical improvements are a bit as if a salesman reduced the price of a product, on top of free delivery. That's nice, sure, but that doesn't mean you need the product any more than before. There are more fundamental reasons why smart contracts are not widely used, and they're not addressed by these technical improvements. [0]: as defined in https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_good_reaso.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... [1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-securities-exchange-cut-up-200-jobs-blockchain-project-2022-12-02/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-securities-exc...

fergie 4y ago

I'm not sure if I totally believe that this article was organically promoted to the front page of HN.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
The other articles making the front page were not "organically" promoted either. Everyone games the system.
flooow 4y ago
I believe there is a small but persistent contingent who would very much like HN to care about cryptocurrency, because HN is very influential among developers and would lend them much-needed credibility. They may or may not be co-ordinating but I don't think that would be necessary to get this onto the front page. What I have noticed is, when crypto has one of its periodic disasters (e.g. collapse of FTX) the comments are generally highly sceptical of the technology, in keeping with the general tone of HN. But occasionally 'good news' articles like this one get boosted and then the top comments are of notably different tone. For example, comments praising Vitalik, a presumed billionaire with unknown motives, dubious achievements and a unspeakably enormous environmental toll against his name, would be very unusual in any other thread.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I'm one of the HN users who upvotes (some) cryptocurrency-related topics. I work in the industry, and enjoy reading about technical things that I find interesting. I upvote many other topics, and crypto-related submissions are definitely a minority. But I upvote what I find interesting, much like you or any other user would upvote what you find interesting. Obviously, there are many people on HN who don't find crypto-related topics interesting (or who only enjoy submissions about crypto-related businesses and projects blowing up, of which there is no shortage). I don't think there is a conspiracy here; if anything, I think you underestimate the number of developers who are primarily interested in the technical aspects of blockchain tech. Also, the things Vitalik posts about are often interesting even to people who generally dislike or aren't interested in cryptocurrency.
- 4y ago

lavventura 4y ago

Only thing that drives Ethereum application ecosystem to allow people to gain and ofcourse to lose money. If Ethereum was not attached to financial interest the project would not grow. I believe the ecosystem and everything, it's all a scam. The platform, new emerging projects, all ads are serving exchanges to liquadate people and gain money and destroy their lives.

stiltzkin 4y ago
The traditional financial system also allow people to gain and lose money, even the U.S. central bank prints money out of air to support wars and loan money to banks.

college_physics 4y ago

ether was a popular concept before Einstein and special relativity but we have discovered since that is actually not needed. just saying :-p

jqpabc123 4y ago

the stablecoins that are most successful today are the centralized ones, mostly USDC, USDT and BUSD. The current crypto market proves one thing --- decentralization is a fantasy, a myth that has yet to be successfully implemented. Remember the golden rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules. In the crypto market, the rulers are the *centralized* exchanges. Centralized exchanges (CEX) have tremendous influence and control over the crypto market just like a central bank. They achieve this by the sheer weight of their trading volume --- and their unrestricted ability to mint stable coins and use them to manipulate the market as they see fit --- just like a central bank with one big difference --- without any transparency or oversight. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In real world practice, even so-called decentralized peer to peer exchanges still follow the trading prices set by the centralized exchanges. Don't take my word for it --- just try buying or selling coins on a DEX for a price that differs significantly from the current CEX rate. It may be possible in theory but in reality, it's highly unlikely. Most reasonable people won't surrender value just for the sake of decentralization.

yunohn 4y ago
I actually know a few crypto enthusiasts who claim to use DEXes. When pressed further, you realise that it’s to avoid KYC/AML and taxes, not for decentralization principles…
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  In other words, "decentralization" is just a talking/selling point that evaporates on closer inspection down where the rubber really meets the road in the crypto market. By going all crypto, you're rejecting fiat central bankers with some transparency and oversight in favor of crypto central bankers who have none.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    For crypto people, the problem with 2008 wasn't that big banks got bailed out on tax payer's dime, the problem is that they as individuals weren't the ones getting the bailout

leashless 4y ago

Here is a Boston Consulting Group report which suggests that tokenised real assets - various kinds of equity, mostly - transacted on chain will amount to $16 trillion a year of transactions by 2030. https://web-assets.bcg.com/1e/a2/5b5f2b7e42dfad2cb3113a291222/on-chain-asset-tokenization.pdf https://web-assets.bcg.com/1e/a2/5b5f2b7e42dfad2cb3113a29122... Recognition of on-chain tokenization by monetary authorities: The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)22 recently launched Project Guardian, a blockchain-based asset tokenization pilot, in collaboration with financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, DBS Bank and Marketnode (SGX joint venture for bonds). The project will involve MAS investigating DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets by creating a liquidity pool of tokenized bonds and deposits to execute borrowing and lending on a public blockchain- based network. In wholesale banking activities, DBS and JP Morgan have both developed digital assets and blockchain technology. Lessons from this project would serve as foundation for informing policy markets on the regulatory guardrails required to use DeFi while also limiting its risks. (quote ends)

rippercushions 4y ago
That report predates the Singapore state investment fund Temasek realizing their investment of $275M into FTX had been lit on fire and burned to ashes, an event that has resulted in awkward questions being asked even in Singapore's pliable Parliament. MAS has been bearish on crypto for a while and you can rest assured this has not improved their outlook.
- leashless 4y ago
  Real World Assets over crypto are not the same as crypto. Not at all. https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/at-the-turning-point-how-crypto-interacts-with-real-world-assets-b4bf3c4b217c https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/at-the-turning...

snarf21 4y ago

Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others. Saying stuff like "supply chain apps" is a key application at the same time global supply chain apps on the blockchain are getting shutdown. The only use case of blockchain is coins and those are merely unregulated pump-and-dump. Bitcoin was an interesting thought experiment but the probably is that you need it to be profitable for individual miners (minus pools) to drive true decentralization and as soon as that is true, economies of scale will win and there will be a drive to centralization.

haakonhr 4y ago
He actually links to the recent Maersk/IBM supply chain blockchain shutdown in the introduction, even though he mentions supply chains again later on
x-complexity 4y ago
> Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others. It comes from a techno-optimist perspective that attempts should still be made to see if it could be solved in the first place. The binary alternative is a nihilistic "don't ever try" mindset, wherein the Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, & Joseph Fourier shouldn't ever try to solve existing problems, and that they should just toil in misery like the rest of us. There definitely exists gradients in between the two, but it's worrying that HN, a supposed place of hackers/experimentalists, is adopting a more "this'll never work" stance over time. The Dropbox negativity was the popular start of this downtrend, & I fear it's getting worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- csomar 4y ago
  I think most people concerns about crypto is either the scam (of other people) or the potential displacement of the system they are part of (which will cause its fall and a loss to them/it's a zero-sum game). Both of these are valid concerns. What I am wondering, however, is if this scamming/pumping money will eventually make a legitimate industry. Many industries/technologies have started out of that (Military, Gambling, Sex, etc...)

matthewdgreen 4y ago

It is not a very impressive list of future technologies for the year 2022, unfortunately. I don't mean this as shade: I just mean that most of these are older ideas that have either been deployed or attempted (with limited success.) Clearly money and DeFi are already real and well-established things, whether they're "going great" is in the eye of the beholder. DAOs have been around for a while, and the main examples Vitalik lists are basically DeFi apps that call themselves DAOs. General-purpose DAOs that have real-world influence remain questionable things, mostly because they have too many human and legal dependencies. On-chain identity might be exciting. NFTs might eventually prove to have exciting real applications beyond apes. Blockchain voting remains an old idea that doesn't have much real benefit outside of DeFi project governance.

LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago

So once again, there are no problems crypto claims to solve that haven't already been solved already.

buzzert 4y ago
Can you give one example? How was something like ENS (Ethereum Name Service) solved already, in a truly decentralized way?
- LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago
  I don't really understand ENS at all, but is it not just DNS for Ethereum addresses and NFTs and whatnot?

Proven 4y ago

rhaway84773 4y ago

> cash-like respect for personal privacy. This is false. If I go out on a date and my date sends me money on chain, I now know their public key and can look up every past and future transaction they make. If they send me cash there’s no way the cash will help me do that. Heck, even Venmo has protections against that.

dagmx 4y ago
Yes, I think many crypto fans conflate anonymity and privacy. however like any anonymous system, once your identity has been associated externally, you lose the privacy garnered by it. The argument would be then to create many burner wallets but that’s also not exactly scalable unless you’re transferring between them off the chain to avoid gas fees.
DennisP 4y ago
There's a system on Ethereum that does protect against that, but US regulators just sanctioned it.
capableweb 4y ago
You would have been able to use something like Tornado Cash outside of the US in order to conceal previous/future transactions from people you interact with. The US has decided that's illegal. Not sure what Ethereum could do about that. zCash and similar cryptocurrencies take a different stand where transactions can be "shielded" and anonymous.
- LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago
  Surprise, surprise! Money laundering is illegal!
  - capableweb 4y ago
    If you think wanting to hide previous/future transactions from other private entities is money laundering and illegal, I think you need to re-educate yourself on how that stuff works. Money laundering is trying to hide the source or nature of illegal activities. Privacy in itself is not illegal nor money laundering.

PaulHoule 4y ago

What I think is funny is that in light of recent events people seem to have entirely forgotten that Ethereum seems to have made the transition to proof-of-stake successfully. This removes one major objection people have to crypto (it doesn't necessarily bake the planet anymore) but still leaves a network that performs like a "TRS-80 with a coin slot attached".

DennisP 4y ago
Scaling is the next major effort. It's not an easy problem but probably easier than proof-of-stake was.

mikhael28 4y ago

'Global reach', yeah in Argentina which is the most economically dysfunctional country in Capitalist history. That's like saying you are proud of the global reach of synthetic drugs at a nightclub in Bristol - it's there because the people there need it to have a good time. People in the rich, developed world don't need crypto - you won't find as many synthetic drugs at an insurance agents office, because the people there don't need them in their daily lives.

unboxingelf 4y ago

If his number one focus is solving money he should start promoting Bitcoin and Lightning.

madelyn-goodman 4y ago

"The identity ecosystem" he describes is most exciting to me. There is so much that can be attached to our on-chain identity beyond just our net worth and jpegs. This year the first house was sold on-chain, and I believe that's just the beginning of these immutable irl transactions.

aaroninsf 4y ago

It is hard to read this list objectively and not conclude immediately that while "limited use" "don't scale" "slow" and "privacy issues" are hypothetically solvable(?), the divergence between investment and expectation and reality is exactly as great as critics assert, and that it is indeed entirely the energy and momentum of greed and grift that keeps this from collapsing back to its natural state, one I was close to prior to the grift, when the technological challenges and approaches were collectively known as "the decentralized internet" and there was not dirty, funny, fake, and stolen money fueling a narcissistic crime carnival.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"All solvable problems." Let us know when they have been solved. Having been on the web since it went public, there has always been a disproportionate amount of prophetic messaging and discourse, not to mention advertising, focused on computers. More often than not, the predictions are wrong. Of course, sometimes, perhaps most of the time, the discussion is "hype" and serves a commercial purpose. One can expect those spreading computer hype will keep trying even when it has a low success rate. The www is an inexpensive medium for advertising and spreading hype.

kevinak 4y ago

I wonder if people around here know that Vitalik tried scamming people with a "quantum computer simulation mining" thing back in 2013? Amazing that more people aren't more vary of him. 1. https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e6af6570f23 https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e... 2. https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1273353652447608834 https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1273353652447608834 3. YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkUpZkeqhF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkUpZkeqhF4

samkon 4y ago
Considering that he was 19 at the time, and that he dropped that project soon after, I think a more charitable reading is that a teenager with some big ideas did something unwise.

didibus 4y ago

The fundamental idea of implementing a cash-like currency digitally still makes sense to me. We've digitized almost everything, doing so with currency makes sense. But the benefits of digitization are normally that it offers something better, generally higher scale, lower cost, easier use, less hassle, faster, better analytics, or other benefits over it's analog version. The truth is, crypto hasn't done so yet, so the tech just isn't there quite yet. There are some benefits over analog, mostly anonymity and lesser scrutiny. And I guess you could include investment bubble as a weird benefit right now. Maybe also easy to use for scams and Ponzi schemes. The thing is, those on their own aren't able to attract a large user base, it'll attract people who specifically want these properties, which is not most people. Eventually, I hope the tech improves, and when that happens and digital currency is truly cheaper and more convenient to use, while retaining all the benefit of analog currencies, like decentralization, point to point transactions, anonymity, etc. And also maybe adding a global non government tied currency to the mix. That's when I think it'll truly be impactful and you'll see crypto adopted by everyone.

baby 4y ago
> But the benefits of digitization are normally that it offers something better, generally higher scale, lower cost, easier use, less hassle, faster, better analytics, or other benefits over it's analog version. > The truth is, crypto hasn't done so yet, so the tech just isn't there quite yet. How do you know this BTW? What are your criterias? If you're considering integration of money, the way your bank issues you a debit/credit card, and allows you to pay at point of sale throughout the world, you're talking about something else: integration. This takes a lot of time and money. If you're talking about running a central bank that's covering the entire world, is easy to interoperate with (anyone can connect to the network and use it), is easy to build on top with (via smart contracts), and costs an infinitely smaller percentage of what it costs to run the financial world today to run? Then I would say that Ethereum and other state-of-the-art blockchains are already winning. The issue is that if someone doesn't work in the financial world, their metrics are not good to understand how to judge and compare different financial backbones.
lovvtide 4y ago
All the speculation stuff is a very wasteful distraction in my opinion. In my opinion, the goal should be a currency that is: 1) Privacy preserving 2) Scaleable (to billions of transactions per second) 3) Permissionless (global and free from government interference) 4) Stable (can function as a unit of account, not an investment vehicle) The last one seems like the hardest because it's not just an engineering problem, it's also a political problem.

throwaway4837 4y ago

Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. "Proof of humanity" in theory is cool, but humans can be bought. Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. Even if unique brain patterns becomes the decentralization key, nothing stops two unique people from colluding and voting in the same direction. Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person. I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.

x-complexity 4y ago
> Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. "Proof of humanity" in theory is cool, but humans can be bought. Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. Even if unique brain patterns becomes the decentralization key, nothing stops two unique people from colluding and voting in the same direction. Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person. > I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely. ---------- > Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. > Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. > It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. > Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person. > Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. > This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. > There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely. The parent comment is likely right, but it's engaging in a "it's not 100% perfect, so it's useless" fallacy: Just because we can't get 100% of the way there doesn't mean that the effort shouldn't be done in the first place. The Bittorrent protocol is a good example of this, as the protocol's not perfect either, relying on centralized trackers for fast peering. Still, that didn't mean that the protocol couldn't improve, with Mainline DHT eventually being developed for the protocol. Even though it's still slower than a centralized tracker, it does its assigned job well & to great success. Were such a viewpoint to be transplanted towards the Bittorrent protocol before DHT's creation, the parent would've likely viewed trackers to be "un-decentralizable" & therefore a waste of time. Attempts at decentralizing trackers would've been seen as a futile effort, as "they'll never be as efficient as centralized trackers". In general, no working system is ever 100% perfect, so why is such an attitude still being projected upon all open-source projects? It's likely that 100% decentralization will never be achieved, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't aim for at least 50%. The alternative is a nihilistic "we'll always need centralization" dystopia, & that fundamentally doesn't sit well with me all.

Octokiddie 4y ago

> Money: the first and still most important app Money is also the thing that will continue to be problematic for Ethereum going forward. Two technical problems drive this: 1. Scalability issues related to a very large block chain size and the associated difficulty in bringing up and running a full node. 2. The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is driving the convergence of validators and exchanges. (1) drives individuals increasingly into the arms of gatekeepers to tell them what's "on the block chain" rather than directly participating on the network. (2) degrades what little censorship resistance Ethereum may have once had.

x-complexity 4y ago
> 1. Scalability issues related to a very large block chain size and the associated difficulty in bringing up and running a full node. This is a problem of 2 parts: Transaction scalability & Storage scalability. Transaction scalability's currently being resolved with various optimistic & zk-based rollup solutions, with the latter rolling out next year (zkSync 2.0, Scroll, & Polygon Zero & Miden) and the former already being improved upon & decentralized (Optimism & Arbitrum). There are still guardrails in place, as they're still being developed/improved on. https://l2beat.com/scaling/risk https://l2beat.com/scaling/risk Storage scalability's a different issue that's also being worked on via data availability (DA) sampling, whereby the use of erasure codes & random sampling allows for data to be split into chunks & distributed amongst the network. With this system, every node doesn't need to hold onto all of the data: The whole network only needs to provide at least 51-99% (depending on the erasure code used) of the chunks to reconstruct the block, verify, & republish the block for everyone else. By doing so, the average case for a node is reduced from "store all data" to "store 1/n of all data", with N being the number of data shards for the entire network. Another way that's being worked on is the creation of Validium rollups, wherein the data is stored off-chain but it can still be proven via proofs published on-chain. It's not as secure as a fully on-chain rollup, but in return, the rollup consumes significantly less gas. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1588669782471368704 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/158866978247136870... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgwVhUjaAAEx_Bb?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgwVhUjaAAEx_Bb?format=jpg&name=...
x-complexity 4y ago