15 ms·
Coinbase Launches Base
- Flatcircle 4y agoI don't quite understand the point?
- nwah1 4y agoIt is trying to make up for the efficiency problems of scaling a trustless network by adding extra points of trust and failure, which ends up with something that is neither efficient nor trustless.
- ur-whale 4y ago>adding extra points of trust and failure [I assume you meant SPOFs] Tongue-in-cheek, but unfortunately true. OTOH, how are you going to remain trustless and scale to users who barely know the difference between an app, a file and a website? Granting that category of users access to crypto markets has always been the keystone of Coinbase's business model.
- toolz 4y ago> neither efficient nor trustless More correctly, it would be *either efficient or trustless. The existence of a layer2 does not make layer 1 unusable. It provides options with tradeoffs.
- ur-whale 4y ago>I don't quite understand the point? Same exact point as with building coinbase: making the tech accessible to non-tech users. 99% of people on the planet wouldn't have known how to buy (even much less hold) BTC before the likes of Coinbase, Bitstamp, etc... My gut feeling that for L2 ETH based-stuff, we drop to down to four nines.
- DSingularity 4y agoWhat do you mean by four 9s?
- SkyMarshal 4y ago99.99% uptime. Ideally you want six nines (99.9999%), or for an always-on decentralized network like Ethereum, nine nines (99.9999999%) uptime. OP is implying their uptime expectation is degrading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...
- karagenit 4y agoI think what they mean is: 99% of people wouldn’t know how to buy BTC without coinbase. 99.99% of people wouldn’t know how to use L2 etherium without coinbase.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoExcept he said "we drop to down to four nines". Drop down from where? Going from 99% to 99.99% is going up, not down.
- karagenit 4y agoGoing down as in, the number of people is going down/getting smaller. When the percentage is referring to people who DON’T understand something, 99% to 99.99% is going down (in number of people who DO understand it). At least, that’s what I think they meant. Example: 6% of urban adults don’t use the internet regularly. When we expand that to urban AND rural adults, that drops down to 10% who don’t use it.
- deweller 4y agoBase is built on Optimism's OP Stack (1). Optimism is a Ethereum Layer 2 network. As an optimistic rollup, it can allow for much cheaper transaction fees. The tradeoff is that while it inherits security from the Ethereum Layer 1 chain, it does have a bigger attack surface since it is dependent on 2 blockchains. Coinbase will support the Base chain in their exchange, thereby giving it some utility out of the gate. 1. https://stack.optimism.io/ https://stack.optimism.io/
- dkdbejwi383 4y agoIs someone able to translate this into plain English for someone who's not au fait with crypto jargon?
- diceduckmonk 4y agoA monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors.
- yazaddaruvala 4y agoVery roughly: One “transaction” on the ETH blockchain costs $X. Therefore they are batching up 10 “transactions” at a time and executing them together as a single “transaction”. This way it only costs $(X*0.1) for each “transaction”.
- tylersmith 4y agoA rollup means instead of putting transactions directly on Ethereum they go to a Coinbase-managed chain that later commits those transactions and their results to the Ethereum chain in a cheaper way than executing them on-chain directly. "Optimistic" means there is a period where people can prove to the chain that Coinbase lied about the transaction results and after that period it's assumed they're correct.
- intotheabyss 4y agoOptimism is an Ethereum optimistic rollup, which means it batches transactions off-chain and then publishes the batches on-chain periodically. Optimistic rollups are said to be 'optimistic' because the assumption is that all the transactions follow the rules and there's a 7-14 day challenge period where anyone can submit a fraud proof and challenge the history of the chain. If fraud is determined to have occurred, then the sequencer who batched the transactions is penalized and the fraud verifier is rewarded. The benefits are two-fold: 1) The off-chain transactions are cheaper because the gas fee is split among many participants instead of one 2) Users of the rollup can exit the rollup back to Ethereum at anytime ensuring full custody of their funds, even if the rollup was malicious or if the rollup halted. Optimism has open-sourced their optimistic rollup stack which allows anyone to fork Optimism and create their own rollup. This is what Coinbase has done. So Coinbase will now have a rollup of their own where they will be responsible for the sequencer (batching transactions) and anyone can deploy EVM compatible applications, like all of the other Layer 2 rollups currently in production. So Uniswap for example may deploy to Base, which will allow Coinbase users to easily use cheap defi.
- mikhael28 4y agoHave people not realized that crypto is a scam?
- beezlewax 4y agoThey've also not realised it contributes very little of value to the planet while consuming enormous amounts of resources. But hey, some crypto bro said you can get rich!
- aortega 4y agoEthereum (which this is based on) do not use PoW anymore, so it consumes very few resources.
- kkielhofner 4y agoExcept for the (currently) 5,505 Ethereum nodes[0] that are currently online... If you (optimistically) assume that each of these nodes consumes 10w of power (that's an extremely low estimate - not every node is a Raspberry Pi) that's 55,0000 watts - or 55 kilowatts, all for a network that can process a maximum of 30 transactions per second and is used by a tiny portion of the population. That's still absolutely abysmal efficiency. Nowhere near the estimated 150 terawatt hours of power consumed by PoW bitcoin but still completely unacceptable and ridiculous for a network where the ATH for daily active addresses was roughly 1.5m and the daily average hovers more around 500k. 481,000 kWh per year and again, looking at node stats the vast majority are amd64 so the real number is at least 5-10x this. [0] - https://www.ethernodes.org/ https://www.ethernodes.org/
- yokem55 4y ago55 KW is a few racks in a datacenter. Figure 300w per u in a 42u rack, and 4 full racks will use the same amount of power.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
- jiveturkey42 4y agoHN hates crypto because the people making the most money are charismatic and risk-takers, which is the antithetical to the corporate engineer personality
- api 4y agoHN hates crypto because the perception at least is that people making money in crypto are just gambling and/or riding a Ponzi scheme bubble. HN likes people who make money by actually creating value. HN also tends to hate conventional fiat currency based financial capitalism for the same reason.
- beezlewax 4y agoCoinbase and their ilk are banks. They've centralized the decentralized. It is hilarious.
- meltyness 4y agoPerhaps this is the new university, we're not a post-idea economy, and once unleashed, commodity software is immutable. Like the calculus, the crypto banks will unleash their ideas and vanish leaving only what is understood good and true.
- AISnakeOil 4y agoExactly, there's no difference between Coinbase and Bank of America.
- tylersmith 4y agoThey have not centralized things that were previously decentralized. They've created new centralized things that provide services at the edges of the decentralized stuff.
- TylerE 4y agoI dunno if you can really call VC exit worship as 'creating value'.
- lgrapenthin 4y agoI guess its one of those fake Ethereum chains where instead of miners Coinbase will just sign or censor all the blocks?
- phillipcarter 4y agoWoof. Missed the hype on this by several months. I get that it's a sunk cost, but is this really the time to launch some web3 nonsense?
- tylersmith 4y agoBusiness-wise yes this is a great time. It's better to be positioned before the next market upswing than to be chasing it. I work with many companies that are using this time to double down on building things instead of coasting on the bull market high of the last couple years.
- phillipcarter 4y agoIs there any sign that there will be an upswing in the web3 market? I don't see it.
- zdbrandon 4y agoNot that I see it either, but if it were that easy to see, we'd be in the upswing. Fortune favors the bold.
- Hamuko 4y ago>Business-wise yes this is a great time. I thought that business-wise Coinbase was kinda in the shitter.
- fishtoaster 4y agoFor each "wave" of crypto techs (currencies, smart contracts, nfts), I've thought to myself, "That's a neat primitive! I wonder what useful thing people will build on it!" And each time, I've continued to wonder more or less indefinitely as... pretty much nothing useful comes out of it. Lots of scams, speculation, and investor money, but nothing I'd actually want to use. The one I'm still most hopeful for is smart contracts. Maybe the only thing preventing people from building useful things on them has been high costs. Maybe all they really need is a widely-used, cheaper smart contract system like Base! That said, I'm not terribly hopeful at this point.
- joyfylbanana 4y agoI still use only BTC and the reason why I use it is not because it is so great technically, I just don't like fiat.
- infecto 4y agoBTC is fiat right?
- Veen 4y agoNo, fiat currencies are backed by states and central banks. BTC has some of the qualities of fiat currency—no commodity backing, etc—but it's not usually classified as one.
- wonderwonder 4y agoIf it's declared legal tender by government declaration or fiat, it's fiat currency. Btc is fiat currency in el Salvador
- Veen 4y agoIt's legal tender in El Salvador. Whether that makes it a fiat currency is a matter of definitions, so not really worth quibbling about.
- oldstrangers 4y agoThe rotating text on top lingered so long on 'games' I was trying to figure out why Coinbase was releasing a game development platform.
- williamcotton 4y agoBecause I’m waiting for a digital CCG that doesn’t have a private marketplace like MTGO!
- chucksta 4y agosame, i'm still trying to figure out how it would even go together? Supporting transactions in them?
- esotericimpl 4y ago[dead]
- anaxag0ras 4y agoI don't understand the point. This is built on Optimism stack, so effectively same as using Optimism. Why not just integrate Coinbase products into Optimism then?
- wmf 4y agoClearly they're betting on the Coinbase brand.
- pr337h4m 4y ago"plans to progressively decentralize in the years ahead"
- hgsgm 4y ago"plans to eventually let go of the rug and not pull it away"* * Plans subject to change.
- beepbooptheory 4y agoI don't understand how like maybe a solo curious developer could ever get into this stuff. Having to pay even a small fee to like run your program, do anything at all, is an utter nightmare to me. Maybe I'm not smart enough and need to rely too much on lots of troubleshooting, recompiling, etc, when I make stuff... I learned programming and love it to this day because it was something I could explore and learn for no money at all, only my shitty chromebook I figured out how to get linux on, and a lot of patience. Even if everything else they say is true about it, it seems to be built around the assumption of having not-insignificant capital. It's a very strange "revolution" to me in this sense, much like the "OpenAI token fees are now our overlord" revolution that people are hyped about as well.
- williamcotton 4y agoOne word: testnet
- beepbooptheory 4y agoOk yeah.. This does address this a little I see. But am I correct that the only thing you can make with Ethereum is stuff that ultimately costs money? Either for you or the users? Is there any similar thing to like free static file hosting through github, or just either way making something cool you want to share for free because its cool/useful. Or does someone always have to give their cc number/wallet at the end of the day?
- williamcotton 4y agoI guess you could subsidize your users like how you subsidize their web hosting costs, eg, when you let them upload and share photos. It seems as though products geared around some kind of digital asset would expect users to be buying and selling and therefore already prepared to have some kind of money.
- kkielhofner 4y agoExcept storing data on chain is insanely expensive (impossible) which is where bolt on adjacent technologies like IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave, etc come in. Have you looked at IPFS pinning hosting costs? It's usually a multiple (between storage and bandwidth) of what you'd pay on S3 or similar. Even running your own node comes with so many operational challenges and consumes an INSANE amount of bandwidth and resources self-hosting for anything beyond a toy personal project gets prohibitive very quickly. The same cheap VPS that can do at least 1k TPS for static files with Nginx (or whatever) probably can't even launch go-ipfs (kubo). So now not only are you (or your users) paying for every database transaction (on chain) your fundamental cost basis is a multiple of what it is today.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- i_love_cookies 4y ago[dead]
- twelve40 4y agoOk also trying to summarize this ELI5: Rolling up transactions makes the money movement on Ethereum cheaper. They highlight 7 use cases to build on Base: * dexs, nfts, bridges, stablecoins, anything that sounds like more crypto for the sake of crypto, so not too terribly interesting to me personally yet. * games Nicely summarized by PretzelPirate: exchange things between games and cash out into ethereum or whatever https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34913311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34913311 * lending What is the use case for lending? Borrowing against "things" that you have on the blockchain?
- pa7x1 4y agoFor those wondering what this is about. Base is an optimistic rollup built on top of Ethereum. An optimistic rollup batches and compresses transactions and general computation. In an analogous manner that .zip or .tar.gz batch and compress files. The rollup executes transactions or general computation (Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain with a Turing complete programming language, so it can execute anything you code), computes a cryptographic proof of its correct execution and posting that to Ethereum. Which then verifies its correct execution. Why do this? Because blockchains don't scale. By don't scale I mean that there is a very explicit trade-off between vertical scalability (beefier nodes) vs. decentralization (barriers for anyone to participate in the consensus) and horizontal scalability (parallelization) vs. security (cost of attack). So Ethereum's approach to solving scalability is to accept head-on this limitation and instead of compromising on decentralization or security find ways around it. With rollups you place the costly execution outside the blockchain and let the blockchain act as verifier and settlement layer of cryptographic proofs of computation. The blockchain verifies proofs, which are much cheaper, while the actual execution is done outside where you can scale vertically and horizontally. With this approach Ethereum has settled over 600 bitcoin-equivalent transactions per second in the last hour (this is the actual figure, I just checked https://ethtps.info/ https://ethtps.info/ ). Remember when 1.5 years ago it was 15? Well... Now it's over 600. And plans to keep scaling until it reaches 1M-10M transactions per second by 2030. So what? Well, Coinbase is an exchange. A centralized exchange, for that matter. When you execute a transaction on Coinbase (or any other centralized exchange... NYSE, Nasdaq, Deutsche Bourse...) what knowledge do you have that the transaction was executed? That the stock the UI says you own is actually there. How do you know shorted stocks are actually lent and exist? This fixes it. You can see the code and be sure that it's executed correctly. When CBDCs happen, and they are going to happen. The same kind of statements could be made for your money.
- throwaway8829 4y agoThis seems like a great explanation. Can I get an ELI5?
- pa7x1 4y agoThis was already my simplified version. What would you like me to expand on?