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> Nothing will go wrong though of course! At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. They've really knocked some maj

> Nothing will go wrong though of course! At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. They've really knocked some major features out of the park over the last few years. Namely, they switched the entire consensus model out, while the plane was flying full of people and that went off pretty much without a hitch. Don't forget that this also had the side effect of significantly cutting power usage not only for ETH, but also for every single other GPU mined PoW chain out there. So yea... they made something creative out of the process of the next round of improvements, and invited you to join. Seems cool to me.

littlestymaar 3y ago
> At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. Accidental* crypto developer here. The most consistent behavior from Ethereum developers is designing “clever home-brewed mechanisms” because they are ”very smart”, and then it turns out this is yet another dirty hack that'll need more dirty hacks in the future to circumvent all its flaws. It's 2023, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to arrogant cranks that have consistently proven over almost a decade that they really are arrogant cranks. [*]gotta pay the bills…
- pa7x1 3y ago
  Could you provide examples of previously deployed dirty hacks that need more dirty hacks to circumvent the flaws?
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Well, the entirety of the “Web3” API is a pile of hacks, but my “favorite” is probably eip-1559 (and not for the “political” reasons, like “make eth deflationary”, it's just very annoying to work with).
    - pa7x1 3y ago
      This is like complaining about the HTTP protocol because you don't like the requests Python library. There is no "Web3" API as part of the Ethereum protocol. "Web3" APIs (in plural because there are multiple ones, in different programming languages) are externally built libraries that expose in an API details about the Ethereum blockchain (blocks, transactions, gas consumed in a block, base fee, etc...). If you don't like a particular library, you can use a different one, or build your own. EIP-1559 has never been patched. It's still functioning as it was conceived. A minor clarification is that it was not introduced to make ETH deflationary, and in fact, it doesn't guarantee in any way that it will be deflationary. It's a side effect of demand for settling on Ethereum exceeding the current issuance of ETH. In much the same way the supply of oil may go down if demand for it is greater than its production. In what ways is it annoying to work with EIP-1559? It's, I would argue, much simpler than it was in the past, as you now have a pre-defined base fee to pay to be included in a block. But perhaps you have something else in mind.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        > This is like complaining about the HTTP protocol because you don't like the requests Python library. There is no "Web3" API as part of the Ethereum protocol. "Web3" APIs (in plural because there are multiple ones, in different programming languages) are externally built libraries that expose in an API details about the Ethereum blockchain (blocks, transactions, gas consumed in a block, base fee, etc...). If you don't like a particular library, you can use a different one, or build your own. The Web3 API is the API exposed by the full node themselves, and it exposes the requirement of the ethereum protocol (example: the nonce, the encoding scheme for smart contracts, the primitives operation of the EVM, etc) . It is then wrapped inside libraries in different languages (and you can write your own) but the underlying stuff is constrained by the blockchain protocol itself (you cannot make the nonce mechanism less stupid no matter how hard you try, for instance, the nodes will just reject your transaction if you don't follow the dumb protocol). > EIP-1559 has never been patched. It's still functioning as it was conceived. Yes, it's the latest hack to have been added to the stack, but it's a hack that obsoleted the former hack, and will end up being obsoleted one day. > In what ways is it annoying to work with EIP-1559? It's, I would argue, much simpler than it was in the past, as you now have a pre-defined base fee to pay to be included in a block. Except if there's congestion, and the base fee isn't enough so you get your transaction rejected, and you have to guess which base fee to set given that it may have increased once more in the meantime. And so to make sure that your transaction get accepted and does not bounce again, you need to overpay (too bad for a change that was supposed to get rid of overpay…) Many things in Ethereum stops working well as soon as you leave the full node itself and develop a third party service relying on its RPC endpoint (which is nonetheless the mainstream way to do it).
- i2cmaster 3y ago
  I had to switch back to bitcoin because Ehtereum just got way too bloated. I wish they'd focus some on making the software/protocol usable for a little while. It's really the gnome of crypto: They're unconcerned about churn and feature creep and too focused on their own small culture.

littlestymaar 3y ago

> At this point, I'm willing to give the Ethereum developers the benefit of the doubt. Accidental* crypto developer here. The most consistent behavior from Ethereum developers is designing “clever home-brewed mechanisms” because they are ”very smart”, and then it turns out this is yet another dirty hack that'll need more dirty hacks in the future to circumvent all its flaws. It's 2023, stop giving the benefit of the doubt to arrogant cranks that have consistently proven over almost a decade that they really are arrogant cranks. [*]gotta pay the bills…

pa7x1 3y ago
Could you provide examples of previously deployed dirty hacks that need more dirty hacks to circumvent the flaws?
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Well, the entirety of the “Web3” API is a pile of hacks, but my “favorite” is probably eip-1559 (and not for the “political” reasons, like “make eth deflationary”, it's just very annoying to work with).
  - pa7x1 3y ago
    This is like complaining about the HTTP protocol because you don't like the requests Python library. There is no "Web3" API as part of the Ethereum protocol. "Web3" APIs (in plural because there are multiple ones, in different programming languages) are externally built libraries that expose in an API details about the Ethereum blockchain (blocks, transactions, gas consumed in a block, base fee, etc...). If you don't like a particular library, you can use a different one, or build your own. EIP-1559 has never been patched. It's still functioning as it was conceived. A minor clarification is that it was not introduced to make ETH deflationary, and in fact, it doesn't guarantee in any way that it will be deflationary. It's a side effect of demand for settling on Ethereum exceeding the current issuance of ETH. In much the same way the supply of oil may go down if demand for it is greater than its production. In what ways is it annoying to work with EIP-1559? It's, I would argue, much simpler than it was in the past, as you now have a pre-defined base fee to pay to be included in a block. But perhaps you have something else in mind.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      > This is like complaining about the HTTP protocol because you don't like the requests Python library. There is no "Web3" API as part of the Ethereum protocol. "Web3" APIs (in plural because there are multiple ones, in different programming languages) are externally built libraries that expose in an API details about the Ethereum blockchain (blocks, transactions, gas consumed in a block, base fee, etc...). If you don't like a particular library, you can use a different one, or build your own. The Web3 API is the API exposed by the full node themselves, and it exposes the requirement of the ethereum protocol (example: the nonce, the encoding scheme for smart contracts, the primitives operation of the EVM, etc) . It is then wrapped inside libraries in different languages (and you can write your own) but the underlying stuff is constrained by the blockchain protocol itself (you cannot make the nonce mechanism less stupid no matter how hard you try, for instance, the nodes will just reject your transaction if you don't follow the dumb protocol). > EIP-1559 has never been patched. It's still functioning as it was conceived. Yes, it's the latest hack to have been added to the stack, but it's a hack that obsoleted the former hack, and will end up being obsoleted one day. > In what ways is it annoying to work with EIP-1559? It's, I would argue, much simpler than it was in the past, as you now have a pre-defined base fee to pay to be included in a block. Except if there's congestion, and the base fee isn't enough so you get your transaction rejected, and you have to guess which base fee to set given that it may have increased once more in the meantime. And so to make sure that your transaction get accepted and does not bounce again, you need to overpay (too bad for a change that was supposed to get rid of overpay…) Many things in Ethereum stops working well as soon as you leave the full node itself and develop a third party service relying on its RPC endpoint (which is nonetheless the mainstream way to do it).
i2cmaster 3y ago
I had to switch back to bitcoin because Ehtereum just got way too bloated. I wish they'd focus some on making the software/protocol usable for a little while. It's really the gnome of crypto: They're unconcerned about churn and feature creep and too focused on their own small culture.