7 ms·

Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again

70 points by bpierre 3y ago

hanniabu 3y ago
> there is a large ideological rift where significant parts of the non-blockchain decentralization community see the crypto world as a distraction, and not as a kindred spirit and a powerful ally This line stood out to me and is sad to see.
- hanniabu 3y ago
  > Non-blockchain decentralization projects are often chronically underfunded, blockchain-based projects get a 50-million dollar series B round. It is not from the benevolence of the staker that we get people to put in their ETH to protect the Ethereum network, but rather from their regard to their own self-interest - and we get $20 billion in economic security as a result.
  - livueta 3y ago
    I think time has demonstrated that some form of (possibly itself centralized to some degree) incentive system can be important for a healthy decentralized ecosystem, but it doesn't necessarily have to be directly monetary: private trackers do pretty well with ratio systems, even through they're not wholly decentralized in the classical sense. I think this has a slightly ironic benefit in practice: by paying out in-kind, as it were, you inherently filter for participants who actually are after the functionality provided by the distributed system and aren't just out to make a quick buck, which leads to a better true believer:huckster ratio. Reminds me of how capitalistic incentives don't always translate to good content: see cooking recipe / other SEO blogspam, or capeshit. Scene respect is the sort of in-kind pseudocurrency that, while not without its own flaws, ime incentivizes better art.
    - meheleventyone 3y ago
      In general I think it’s much more about utility and marketing spend versus convenience. Incentives like rewards are what keeps you a good citizen. Decentralized projects find it hard to achieve critical mass when they rely on personal ideology as the main driver of adoption, particularly in spheres where large centralized alternatives exist. Trackers and crypto are popular because they offer utility to users that you don’t find in centralized systems. You can even see the popularity of trackers shift as centralized services like Netflix appeared and then got worse. Crypto is all about ‘degen gamblers’ but as a result has oodles of cash, that in turn they’ve been spending hand over fist on marketing to get in more greater fools. The problem for crypto is how to square the utility they provide with the ideological mission whilst still managing to maintain momentum when arguably moving to the latter cannibalizes the former.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - throwaway2562 3y ago
      > Scene respect is the sort of in-kind pseudocurrency that, while not without its own flaws, ime incentivizes better art. Interesting. Let me disagree though. As an intangible, unquantifiable pseudocurrency - we’re getting into the realm where currency-as-analogy sounds both pointed and on-topic, but is a somewhat strained analogy - ‘scene respect’ is as corrosive, perverting and uh… pervertible as any other incentive. It breeds quasi-religions, staffed by gurus and followers, blighted by orthodoxies and schisms. All of which the pre- and post-bust cryptoverse has. All of which seem to matter very little when real money arrives, which it may well again.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
try_the_bass 3y ago
> Having lived through that era, the number one culprit that I would blame as the root cause of this shift is the rise in transaction fees. Haha no, the number one culprit is that 99% of blockchain projects are either scams, bullshit, not actually decentralized, or simply fail despite pulling in vast amounts of funding (sometimes more than one of the above!). However, I do agree that most--if not all--problems in the cryptocurrency space arise from the "currency" aspect. Just not so directly as "transaction fees".
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  You are right but it is by design. From day one Satoshi had a road map to scale BTC to Visa-like levels while keeping TX fees around a penny. Just incrementally increase the block size over time. Soon after Blockstream's Greg Maxwell and Adam Back hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo they locked down the block size to 1mb, something Satoshi and the original devs never imagined anyone being dumb enough to do let alone intended. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) stayed with the road map and has worked great with low fees for over a decade now. BTC twisted itself into a digital ponzi scheme for morons.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    > Soon after Blockstream's Greg Maxwell and Adam Back hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo they locked down the block size to 1mb, something Satoshi and the original devs never imagined anyone being dumb enough to do let alone intended. Doesn't this point to Bitcoin's decentralized nature being largely smoke and mirrors? You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
    - dannyw 3y ago
      There was a big fight over the future of bitcoin. There are 6-7 core developers in that era, and multiple clients, but bitcoind was dominant. Blockstream was able to create the perception of an economic majority — thanks to forums like Bitcointalk and Reddit (moderated by one guy: Theymos / Michael Marquant). In reality, a lot of people didn’t support blockstream, but through censorship and permanent bans, a few people were able to create the perception of economic majority. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240267
monero-xmr 3y ago
My user name is a reference to one of the hardcore cypherpunk coins https://www.getmonero.org/ https://www.getmonero.org/ They also run the cryptocurrency village at Defcon. Monero researchers have figured out how to do true atomic swaps between Bitcoin and monero, ensuring the exchange delistings will not kill the ultimate privacy coin https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1126.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1126.pdf Finally, the IRS offered a bounty if you could trace XMR. Not claimed (as far as we know!). How many other coins have that level of state interest https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs-will-pay-up-to-625000-if-you-can-crack-monero-other-privacy-coins/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Okay — sell me on why I should use this coin. (I feel inclined to agree, but I want more solid reasoning.)
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Monero is the largest privacy coin, with the largest set of mixins / decoys. If the idea of cash appeals to you - the right to buy something without being data mined and tracked by endless private firms and the government itself - then monero is a digital version of that. Monero means money - it is digital cash. Fungible, private, anonymous.
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    You can send/receive monero in private, but that's where the utility ends unfortunately. It can't do all the stuff ethereum is capable of doing.
- fruity231 3y ago
  To a crypto noob like me, XMR is the only crypto that makes sense and I am ever surprised it's not more popular. It aims for one thing, untraceable payments, and not only seems to do that well, it actually is used to pay for stuff. Granted, most of that stuff is probably illegal, but it seems to work as a currency and not an 'investment' which seems to be the case for most of the other coins.
Animats 3y ago
"Use DEXes plus stablecoins" The trouble is, neither of those make money if run honestly. A true distributed exchange never has custody of anything. So there's no opportunity to steal or speculate with customer funds. (Front-running remains a possibility). It's just a back-end data service. It has to charge a commission. Most crypto exchanges are free to use; they make money either by stealing or manipulation. Much the same is true for stablecoins. Tether just printed another billion dollars worth of Tether. Nobody deposited a billion dollars worth of USD. USDC is supposedly backed by U.S. Government securities, but is not formally audited.
- staplers 3y ago
  Tether just printed another billion dollars worth of Tether. Wait til you learn how much USD is printed.
  - tout 3y ago
    USD is backed by the value and legitimacy of the world's largest economy and world's largest military. I don't think Tether has that kind of track record...
    - staplers 3y ago
      Not sure you understand how inflation works.
- mattdesl 3y ago
  How problematic is a 0.3% fee? If the two options were otherwise equal, I think most users would rather pay that than deal with potentially losing their funds altogether due to fraud or insolvency.
  - Animats 3y ago
    For active traders, huge.
    - 3y ago
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
> "When the cost of writing to the chain is $0.001, or even $0.1, you could imagine people making all kinds of applications that use blockchains in various ways...." nonsense. plenty of chains do this, but all have the same copy-pasted dapps. ethereum is horrible, cannot die soon enough imo. ETH and BTC maxis are also very toxic community.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Plenty of chains do this... Most of them (the smart contract ones, "ethereum killers" and such, since we are talking about ethereum) use delegated validator schemes and other such marketing speak for "centralized", unfortunately. If the network grinds to a halt because the core dev team disappears it isn't sufficiently decentralized. If a consensus network can be shut down by a small group of individuals it isn't sufficiently decentralized.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Aaah, the ethereum + swarm + whisper infographic, oh I have missed you so. This criticism he levies at web3 here is the core reason I stopped believing in the vision. I was a big fan of it when ethereum launched mainnet. Mist browser, a reference interface for a truly decentralized internet. The vision: decentralized message transport, file storage and consensus/finality/incentivization for applications that need it. What a beautiful idea. Instead we got metamask and http websites selling us erc20 tokens. I think I probably agree that a big part of it is transaction fees. I think though that the Ethereum project abandoning the idea of a reference client left people to develop with the tools they had. There's no money in building a new browser for a different kind of web. There is money in selling DAO tokens to supposedly fund a lock that can be locked and unlocked by sending a cryptographically signed transaction executed on every node on a network and paid for for no good reason to be kept on record forever by everyone on the network. Don't have the decentralized tools to build it? Eh, fuck it, just build a website with pretty animations and flat monochrome icons that fade in and out as you scroll. As long as they can send us ETH we are happy, we will decentralize the rest later when someone else does the heavy lifting. We needed mist to make this happen. The reason web3 failed is because the only part of it that ever actually worked was ethereum, and that's all that's needed to get people to give you their money. If we had bootstrapped with swarm and whisper them there would've been no excuse from dapp builders why all they have is a regular website, and scams wouldn't have become so prolific because we would have a baseline standard: the whole thing has to be decentralized or you're not getting a dime.
- try_the_bass 3y ago
  I feel the same. I used to be pretty into the concept and values of Ethereum, until I realized the values of those actually building the network weren't what I thought they were, and thus weren't aligned with mine. Funny you mention said lock, because the pivot and associated fallout there was what really revealed (to me) that the creators of Ethereum cared more about the "currency" aspect than the "crypto" aspect. From that point on, you could see this reflected in every decision made about the development and direction of Ethereum and the associated ecosystem. There were numerous core protocol decisions that ultimately came down to "better for future users of the network or better for current users of the network", and the latter won out every time, especially when economics were involved--and they're always involved with a cryptocurrency. Number go up, and whatnot.
wslh 3y ago
It is peculiar that there are strong discussion around crypto and Coinbase was in S12 batch [1] and one of the top by revenue. Paul Graham continues to praise and recognize how prescient Brian Armstrong was [2]. To be objective there were other companies in the space before Coinbase that are still alive [3]. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/revenue https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/revenue [2] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1740936771192623175 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1740936771192623175 [3] https://www.coinfabrik.com/blog/oldest-blockchain-companies/ https://www.coinfabrik.com/blog/oldest-blockchain-companies/

70 points by bpierre 3y ago

> there is a large ideological rift where significant parts of the non-blockchain decentralization community see the crypto world as a distraction, and not as a kindred spirit and a powerful ally This line stood out to me and is sad to see.

hanniabu 3y ago
> Non-blockchain decentralization projects are often chronically underfunded, blockchain-based projects get a 50-million dollar series B round. It is not from the benevolence of the staker that we get people to put in their ETH to protect the Ethereum network, but rather from their regard to their own self-interest - and we get $20 billion in economic security as a result.
- livueta 3y ago
  I think time has demonstrated that some form of (possibly itself centralized to some degree) incentive system can be important for a healthy decentralized ecosystem, but it doesn't necessarily have to be directly monetary: private trackers do pretty well with ratio systems, even through they're not wholly decentralized in the classical sense. I think this has a slightly ironic benefit in practice: by paying out in-kind, as it were, you inherently filter for participants who actually are after the functionality provided by the distributed system and aren't just out to make a quick buck, which leads to a better true believer:huckster ratio. Reminds me of how capitalistic incentives don't always translate to good content: see cooking recipe / other SEO blogspam, or capeshit. Scene respect is the sort of in-kind pseudocurrency that, while not without its own flaws, ime incentivizes better art.
  - meheleventyone 3y ago
    In general I think it’s much more about utility and marketing spend versus convenience. Incentives like rewards are what keeps you a good citizen. Decentralized projects find it hard to achieve critical mass when they rely on personal ideology as the main driver of adoption, particularly in spheres where large centralized alternatives exist. Trackers and crypto are popular because they offer utility to users that you don’t find in centralized systems. You can even see the popularity of trackers shift as centralized services like Netflix appeared and then got worse. Crypto is all about ‘degen gamblers’ but as a result has oodles of cash, that in turn they’ve been spending hand over fist on marketing to get in more greater fools. The problem for crypto is how to square the utility they provide with the ideological mission whilst still managing to maintain momentum when arguably moving to the latter cannibalizes the former.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway2562 3y ago
    > Scene respect is the sort of in-kind pseudocurrency that, while not without its own flaws, ime incentivizes better art. Interesting. Let me disagree though. As an intangible, unquantifiable pseudocurrency - we’re getting into the realm where currency-as-analogy sounds both pointed and on-topic, but is a somewhat strained analogy - ‘scene respect’ is as corrosive, perverting and uh… pervertible as any other incentive. It breeds quasi-religions, staffed by gurus and followers, blighted by orthodoxies and schisms. All of which the pre- and post-bust cryptoverse has. All of which seem to matter very little when real money arrives, which it may well again.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

try_the_bass 3y ago

> Having lived through that era, the number one culprit that I would blame as the root cause of this shift is the rise in transaction fees. Haha no, the number one culprit is that 99% of blockchain projects are either scams, bullshit, not actually decentralized, or simply fail despite pulling in vast amounts of funding (sometimes more than one of the above!). However, I do agree that most--if not all--problems in the cryptocurrency space arise from the "currency" aspect. Just not so directly as "transaction fees".

kylebenzle 3y ago
You are right but it is by design. From day one Satoshi had a road map to scale BTC to Visa-like levels while keeping TX fees around a penny. Just incrementally increase the block size over time. Soon after Blockstream's Greg Maxwell and Adam Back hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo they locked down the block size to 1mb, something Satoshi and the original devs never imagined anyone being dumb enough to do let alone intended. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) stayed with the road map and has worked great with low fees for over a decade now. BTC twisted itself into a digital ponzi scheme for morons.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > Soon after Blockstream's Greg Maxwell and Adam Back hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo they locked down the block size to 1mb, something Satoshi and the original devs never imagined anyone being dumb enough to do let alone intended. Doesn't this point to Bitcoin's decentralized nature being largely smoke and mirrors? You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
  - dannyw 3y ago
    There was a big fight over the future of bitcoin. There are 6-7 core developers in that era, and multiple clients, but bitcoind was dominant. Blockstream was able to create the perception of an economic majority — thanks to forums like Bitcointalk and Reddit (moderated by one guy: Theymos / Michael Marquant). In reality, a lot of people didn’t support blockstream, but through censorship and permanent bans, a few people were able to create the perception of economic majority. More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240267

monero-xmr 3y ago

My user name is a reference to one of the hardcore cypherpunk coins https://www.getmonero.org/ https://www.getmonero.org/ They also run the cryptocurrency village at Defcon. Monero researchers have figured out how to do true atomic swaps between Bitcoin and monero, ensuring the exchange delistings will not kill the ultimate privacy coin https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1126.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1126.pdf Finally, the IRS offered a bounty if you could trace XMR. Not claimed (as far as we know!). How many other coins have that level of state interest https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs-will-pay-up-to-625000-if-you-can-crack-monero-other-privacy-coins/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...

zmgsabst 3y ago
Okay — sell me on why I should use this coin. (I feel inclined to agree, but I want more solid reasoning.)
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Monero is the largest privacy coin, with the largest set of mixins / decoys. If the idea of cash appeals to you - the right to buy something without being data mined and tracked by endless private firms and the government itself - then monero is a digital version of that. Monero means money - it is digital cash. Fungible, private, anonymous.
- hanniabu 3y ago
  You can send/receive monero in private, but that's where the utility ends unfortunately. It can't do all the stuff ethereum is capable of doing.
fruity231 3y ago
To a crypto noob like me, XMR is the only crypto that makes sense and I am ever surprised it's not more popular. It aims for one thing, untraceable payments, and not only seems to do that well, it actually is used to pay for stuff. Granted, most of that stuff is probably illegal, but it seems to work as a currency and not an 'investment' which seems to be the case for most of the other coins.

Animats 3y ago

"Use DEXes plus stablecoins" The trouble is, neither of those make money if run honestly. A true distributed exchange never has custody of anything. So there's no opportunity to steal or speculate with customer funds. (Front-running remains a possibility). It's just a back-end data service. It has to charge a commission. Most crypto exchanges are free to use; they make money either by stealing or manipulation. Much the same is true for stablecoins. Tether just printed another billion dollars worth of Tether. Nobody deposited a billion dollars worth of USD. USDC is supposedly backed by U.S. Government securities, but is not formally audited.

staplers 3y ago
Tether just printed another billion dollars worth of Tether. Wait til you learn how much USD is printed.
- tout 3y ago
  USD is backed by the value and legitimacy of the world's largest economy and world's largest military. I don't think Tether has that kind of track record...
  - staplers 3y ago
    Not sure you understand how inflation works.
mattdesl 3y ago
How problematic is a 0.3% fee? If the two options were otherwise equal, I think most users would rather pay that than deal with potentially losing their funds altogether due to fraud or insolvency.
- Animats 3y ago
  For active traders, huge.
  - 3y ago

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

> "When the cost of writing to the chain is $0.001, or even $0.1, you could imagine people making all kinds of applications that use blockchains in various ways...." nonsense. plenty of chains do this, but all have the same copy-pasted dapps. ethereum is horrible, cannot die soon enough imo. ETH and BTC maxis are also very toxic community.

friend_and_foe 3y ago
Plenty of chains do this... Most of them (the smart contract ones, "ethereum killers" and such, since we are talking about ethereum) use delegated validator schemes and other such marketing speak for "centralized", unfortunately. If the network grinds to a halt because the core dev team disappears it isn't sufficiently decentralized. If a consensus network can be shut down by a small group of individuals it isn't sufficiently decentralized.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

friend_and_foe 3y ago

Aaah, the ethereum + swarm + whisper infographic, oh I have missed you so. This criticism he levies at web3 here is the core reason I stopped believing in the vision. I was a big fan of it when ethereum launched mainnet. Mist browser, a reference interface for a truly decentralized internet. The vision: decentralized message transport, file storage and consensus/finality/incentivization for applications that need it. What a beautiful idea. Instead we got metamask and http websites selling us erc20 tokens. I think I probably agree that a big part of it is transaction fees. I think though that the Ethereum project abandoning the idea of a reference client left people to develop with the tools they had. There's no money in building a new browser for a different kind of web. There is money in selling DAO tokens to supposedly fund a lock that can be locked and unlocked by sending a cryptographically signed transaction executed on every node on a network and paid for for no good reason to be kept on record forever by everyone on the network. Don't have the decentralized tools to build it? Eh, fuck it, just build a website with pretty animations and flat monochrome icons that fade in and out as you scroll. As long as they can send us ETH we are happy, we will decentralize the rest later when someone else does the heavy lifting. We needed mist to make this happen. The reason web3 failed is because the only part of it that ever actually worked was ethereum, and that's all that's needed to get people to give you their money. If we had bootstrapped with swarm and whisper them there would've been no excuse from dapp builders why all they have is a regular website, and scams wouldn't have become so prolific because we would have a baseline standard: the whole thing has to be decentralized or you're not getting a dime.

try_the_bass 3y ago
I feel the same. I used to be pretty into the concept and values of Ethereum, until I realized the values of those actually building the network weren't what I thought they were, and thus weren't aligned with mine. Funny you mention said lock, because the pivot and associated fallout there was what really revealed (to me) that the creators of Ethereum cared more about the "currency" aspect than the "crypto" aspect. From that point on, you could see this reflected in every decision made about the development and direction of Ethereum and the associated ecosystem. There were numerous core protocol decisions that ultimately came down to "better for future users of the network or better for current users of the network", and the latter won out every time, especially when economics were involved--and they're always involved with a cryptocurrency. Number go up, and whatnot.

wslh 3y ago

It is peculiar that there are strong discussion around crypto and Coinbase was in S12 batch [1] and one of the top by revenue. Paul Graham continues to praise and recognize how prescient Brian Armstrong was [2]. To be objective there were other companies in the space before Coinbase that are still alive [3]. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/revenue https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/revenue [2] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1740936771192623175 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1740936771192623175 [3] https://www.coinfabrik.com/blog/oldest-blockchain-companies/ https://www.coinfabrik.com/blog/oldest-blockchain-companies/