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> I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a sto

> I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value. I find this "value proposition" highly dubious. You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM. Distributed compute on its own doesn't confer any points as a "store of value." The nature of the compute needs to be something that can be done strictly in the blockchain domain, and as we've seen, the result is a system that's easy to manipulate by spinning up new shitcoins, insider trading, wash trades, and worse - not to mention the loss of privacy given how effective on-chain analysis is. The features that make up a cryptocurrency make it decidedly unsuitable as the basis of a modern financial system. Some of the underlying principles are "neat," but that's as far as the tech goes for me.

alexambarch 4y ago
> You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself to make those changes is a digital token is what I find interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the fact that people arguably care about the state of this system is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.
- yunohn 4y ago
  What does this state hold exactly?
  - alexambarch 4y ago
    What entity an ENS record is registered to, who owns what JPEG, who sent who some Ether... Ethereum is one big state machine so that state holds everything.
    - Yizahi 4y ago
      For ENS - yes, for JPEG or whatever else - definitively no. There is literally nothing stored inside the token to describe who owns a digital or physical artifact outside of blockchain and it is technically impossible to store such info in the blockchain, while keeping even a current sham of decentralization, transaction throughput and gas price.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Ethereum (or any other blockchain) is unable to establish legal ownership of a JPEG.
- threeseed 4y ago
  The problem is the shared state is so small and expensive that the majority of the state gets managed elsewhere and is merely linked to the chain. And so it's debatable if you've really achieved all that much.
mattdesl 4y ago
Placing control of the world’s compute under a small handful of powerful megacorps is not exactly ideal. Imagining a future where we can use and participate in (as stakers/validators) decentralized compute, storage, transactions, contracts, etc is pretty interesting.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Most cryptocurrency mining still ends up being done by a few huge companies though.
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    Users cede very little control to PoS validators in Ethereum. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685482
- yunohn 4y ago
  There are innumerable companies you can rent cloud resources from - bare metal to “serverless”. Ethereum, on the other hand, is severely limited in what you can achieve for any amount of rent.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Who exactly do you think underpins most of Ethereum. It's mega corporations. [1] And decentralisation in crypto is in reality a myth when you have so many centralised players e.g. Binance, Metamask, OpenSea. [1] https://crypto.news/3-cloud-providers-responsible-for-over-two-thirds-of-ethereum-nodes-messari-says/ https://crypto.news/3-cloud-providers-responsible-for-over-t...
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    The article cites a tweet, which cites Ethernodes. According to that site, 63% of hosted nodes are run by Amazon, or about 39% of all nodes. The next largest host is Hetzner at 7% of hosted (far lower than it was a few months ago, because they announced they are no longer supporting Ethereum) which accounts for about 4% of all nodes. Not that surprising, since Amazon runs a huge percentage of all hosted compute in the world. Luckily, Amazon owning a large share of nodes doesn’t mean they own or can control Ethereum. But they certainly do pose a risk to the overall network security and health, and validation-at-home can and should continue to be made easier. https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting
gus_massa 4y ago
I think it's worse. If you ask AWS for 1000 distributed machines, you can run 1000 different calculations and then somehow aggregate the results. In the Ethereum network, if you ask for a calculation then all the miners must do it, and then all the validators must do it. So you acually have a repeated calculation, not a distributed calculation. The only distributed part was calculating the next block with POW, but IIRC they switched to POS.
- wanderingbort 4y ago
  I agree it’s worse on any measure that can reduced to “distributed computation”. But that’s not what it’s doing. Not really. The only distributed computation is the one establishing trust that there has been no Byzantine failure of consensus. Everything else is non-distributed non-parallel computation within a framework that statistically guarantees faithful and accurate processing. It’s a competitor to trusted computing. One specifically designed against the single entity root of trust that underpins intels offering eg. [edit: fixed some typos]
  - ilyt 4y ago
    That kinda doesn't matter when the amount of compute is trivially reproduced by '90's CPUs You can just have a bunch of notes and vote out bad results. You can say "how do you know that 20 different machines you run that do not have hardware backdoor but how do you know software running ethereum is not backdoored ? There is no protection for the compute engine being backdoored, just the fact you'd need to get that backdoored software to most nodes.
    - wanderingbort 4y ago
      In order to convince one honest node you’d have to backdoor every node they talk to. Multiple independent implementations co-exist on the network including many private implementations. Perhaps the best defense is the vigilance of the community as they regularly build consensus around the head blocks hash which is hard to forge if the ledger contains any material impacts of an exploit. Trivial detection of malicious acts is the feature. It’s true it’s not perfect but your analysis trivializes the effort to compromise even one honest node.
wanderingbort 4y ago
The interface to the globally available computation is a bit different and I think novel. In order for my application and yours to interact we had to both chose the same ecosystem and invest in it to some minimal degree. It’s easy to frame that negatively. But there are some positive aspects to that mutual agreement to invest. Similar to how you may deploy an open standard of authentication inside your infrastructure, the expectation is that the community will improve tools and share innovations over time even if you aren’t directly interacting with any of them. It’s not required. It’s just an expectation. Ethereum is like that. There is a community of developers extending the ecosystem and it’s exclusively people who invest in and use the platform. We can mince words over the value prop of cryptocurrency and a decentralized ledger but, I don’t get the same belonging to a community on AWS or GCP. FWIW most of the people I work with in the community dislike the same scammers that you do.

alexambarch 4y ago

> You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself to make those changes is a digital token is what I find interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the fact that people arguably care about the state of this system is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.

yunohn 4y ago
What does this state hold exactly?
- alexambarch 4y ago
  What entity an ENS record is registered to, who owns what JPEG, who sent who some Ether... Ethereum is one big state machine so that state holds everything.
  - Yizahi 4y ago
    For ENS - yes, for JPEG or whatever else - definitively no. There is literally nothing stored inside the token to describe who owns a digital or physical artifact outside of blockchain and it is technically impossible to store such info in the blockchain, while keeping even a current sham of decentralization, transaction throughput and gas price.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Ethereum (or any other blockchain) is unable to establish legal ownership of a JPEG.
threeseed 4y ago
The problem is the shared state is so small and expensive that the majority of the state gets managed elsewhere and is merely linked to the chain. And so it's debatable if you've really achieved all that much.

mattdesl 4y ago

Placing control of the world’s compute under a small handful of powerful megacorps is not exactly ideal. Imagining a future where we can use and participate in (as stakers/validators) decentralized compute, storage, transactions, contracts, etc is pretty interesting.

nivenkos 4y ago
Most cryptocurrency mining still ends up being done by a few huge companies though.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  Users cede very little control to PoS validators in Ethereum. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685482
yunohn 4y ago
There are innumerable companies you can rent cloud resources from - bare metal to “serverless”. Ethereum, on the other hand, is severely limited in what you can achieve for any amount of rent.
threeseed 4y ago
Who exactly do you think underpins most of Ethereum. It's mega corporations. [1] And decentralisation in crypto is in reality a myth when you have so many centralised players e.g. Binance, Metamask, OpenSea. [1] https://crypto.news/3-cloud-providers-responsible-for-over-two-thirds-of-ethereum-nodes-messari-says/ https://crypto.news/3-cloud-providers-responsible-for-over-t...
- mattdesl 4y ago
  The article cites a tweet, which cites Ethernodes. According to that site, 63% of hosted nodes are run by Amazon, or about 39% of all nodes. The next largest host is Hetzner at 7% of hosted (far lower than it was a few months ago, because they announced they are no longer supporting Ethereum) which accounts for about 4% of all nodes. Not that surprising, since Amazon runs a huge percentage of all hosted compute in the world. Luckily, Amazon owning a large share of nodes doesn’t mean they own or can control Ethereum. But they certainly do pose a risk to the overall network security and health, and validation-at-home can and should continue to be made easier. https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting

gus_massa 4y ago

I think it's worse. If you ask AWS for 1000 distributed machines, you can run 1000 different calculations and then somehow aggregate the results. In the Ethereum network, if you ask for a calculation then all the miners must do it, and then all the validators must do it. So you acually have a repeated calculation, not a distributed calculation. The only distributed part was calculating the next block with POW, but IIRC they switched to POS.

wanderingbort 4y ago
I agree it’s worse on any measure that can reduced to “distributed computation”. But that’s not what it’s doing. Not really. The only distributed computation is the one establishing trust that there has been no Byzantine failure of consensus. Everything else is non-distributed non-parallel computation within a framework that statistically guarantees faithful and accurate processing. It’s a competitor to trusted computing. One specifically designed against the single entity root of trust that underpins intels offering eg. [edit: fixed some typos]
- ilyt 4y ago
  That kinda doesn't matter when the amount of compute is trivially reproduced by '90's CPUs You can just have a bunch of notes and vote out bad results. You can say "how do you know that 20 different machines you run that do not have hardware backdoor but how do you know software running ethereum is not backdoored ? There is no protection for the compute engine being backdoored, just the fact you'd need to get that backdoored software to most nodes.
  - wanderingbort 4y ago
    In order to convince one honest node you’d have to backdoor every node they talk to. Multiple independent implementations co-exist on the network including many private implementations. Perhaps the best defense is the vigilance of the community as they regularly build consensus around the head blocks hash which is hard to forge if the ledger contains any material impacts of an exploit. Trivial detection of malicious acts is the feature. It’s true it’s not perfect but your analysis trivializes the effort to compromise even one honest node.

wanderingbort 4y ago

The interface to the globally available computation is a bit different and I think novel. In order for my application and yours to interact we had to both chose the same ecosystem and invest in it to some minimal degree. It’s easy to frame that negatively. But there are some positive aspects to that mutual agreement to invest. Similar to how you may deploy an open standard of authentication inside your infrastructure, the expectation is that the community will improve tools and share innovations over time even if you aren’t directly interacting with any of them. It’s not required. It’s just an expectation. Ethereum is like that. There is a community of developers extending the ecosystem and it’s exclusively people who invest in and use the platform. We can mince words over the value prop of cryptocurrency and a decentralized ledger but, I don’t get the same belonging to a community on AWS or GCP. FWIW most of the people I work with in the community dislike the same scammers that you do.