vbuterin

8 ms·

31.
by vbuterin 5y ago
I think you're conflating _consensus_ and _governance_; the two are quite different. It's not PoW vs PoS that allows a chain to resist a coordinated attempt by elites to force a protocol change, it's users personally verifyin
32.
by vbuterin 6y ago
> It seems that nearly every "public good" in the Ethereum ecosystem got gobbled up by VCs and pivoted to for-profit endeavors And this is because.... we don't have good public goods funding and so once the teams' cap
33.
by vbuterin 6y ago
It is.
34.
by vbuterin 6y ago
> Doesn't this explain crypto-user's pro-Trump bias? It does. But I was never surprised that there were people willing to bet for Trump. I was surprised by the lack of people taking the opportunity that was sitting there for ov
35.
by vbuterin 6y ago
When I last looked at Ouroboros it still had the property that there's only "one confirmation per slot", so you need to wait ~log(n) slots before an attacker has a <1/n probability of reversing the chain. I personally
36.
by vbuterin 6y ago
> Second, any consensus protocol can only remain live as long as there are no more than f faults out of 3f+1 replicas. This is again irrespective of the network model We actually know of consensus protocols that require synchrony includ
37.
by vbuterin 6y ago
There's a couple things wrong here: > Proof of Stake not only replicates the same dynamics that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate (more wealth -> more power in system) There is no legitimate sense in which PoS _is_ an instance of
38.
by vbuterin 6y ago
> * the fact that 20% of the block reward is given to the founders as a "fee". i.e. 6 people will end up with 20% of a "global currency". This applied to the first 4 years of issuance, so it's actually only 10% o
39.
by vbuterin 6y ago
I agree with this. Blockchains are pretty much a novel subset of cryptography, and I expect the most interesting protocols/applications that get called "crypto" in the next ten years are going to make heavy use of both blockc
40.
by vbuterin 7y ago
You can't have decentralized DNS without some form of shared state, where the shared state must resolve the problem of "if I use key X to change the owner to Y, but then later on someone hacks my key and sends a message to change
41.
by vbuterin 7y ago
> The decentralized web isn't using non-web projects or web abstraction layers. The decentralized web is everyone hosting their own webserver from home. It's easy, everyone has a fast enough connection, and without the motives
42.
by vbuterin 7y ago
I've talked to a bunch of these people. I definitely don't think abdication of social responsibility of any form is the goal. Those people don't bother with the effort of trying to cook up new jurisdictions, and just go to va
43.
by vbuterin 11y ago
https://github.com/vbuterin/scalability_paper/raw/master/sca... is the newest one. And here's a google doc modeling transaction throughput with that algo: https://docs.google.com/spr
44.
by vbuterin 11y ago
Have _I_ ever claimed that Ethereum will "change humanity"? (for those who don't know, I'm the founder :) )
45.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> Let's say one day China had enough of Bitcoin, and used their essentially limitless resources to gain enough hashing power at will, to block transactions or rewrite them or what have you. Entirely plausible with Bitcoin That'
46.
by vbuterin 12y ago
You're saying "how do we know that that quora will sufficiently overlap?". David seems to be saying "how do we know they won't?". At this point, I think just about everyone can agree that the security depends o
47.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Validators are expensive to run. You need to put down a large security deposit in order to be a validator, and being a cheating validator will cost you the entire deposit.
48.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> The purpose of a blockchain is to achieve consensus without trusting anyone. If you trust that group, you probably would get along just as well with them managing a centralized database of transactions for you. See https://b
49.
by vbuterin 12y ago
I think something like that would happen about an order of magnitude less often than accidentally reusing k values or publishing your private key to the internet :)
50.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> As your transaction goes into the blockchain, you can be pretty damn sure that won't be reversed, once enough computing power is behind it. So, this by itself is not an argument. That amount of computing power was produced once, s
51.
by vbuterin 12y ago
I think you underemphasize this point. My Slasher algo ( https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proo... ) from way back then does use sampling; Tendermint does not, and thus gains a whole bun
52.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> you have total control over the seed determining the next set of valdators There are many possible algorithms for determining this seed, some of which do solve the stake grinding problem. I personally like the NXT algo; its basic appro
53.
by vbuterin 12y ago
I strongly agree that byzantine fault tolerance theory by itself is a vastly insufficient model for explaining the workings of a cryptoeconomic consensus system. Cryptoeconomic consensus systems actually have to deal with five separate prob
54.
by vbuterin 12y ago
I'm all in favor of price surging and all that, but it saddens me that Uber spends so little time thinking about PR. Particularly, there's an obvious fix that will probably win them a lot of support: during surges, only charge the
55.
by vbuterin 12y ago
No, the block count is the only thing that matters. If an attacker has X hashpower, the probability that they will succeed in a 51% attack after N confirmations is (X / (1 - X))^N ; you can derive this formula yourself via generating f
56.
by vbuterin 12y ago
I briefly mentioned Ethereum 1.5 at the end of my blog post; I'll soon cover some clever ways of creating quasi-scalable dapps using the ETH blockchain as a usually-inexpensive security backend. Believe me, consensus and scalability ar
57.
by vbuterin 12y ago
> Accordingly, I'd argue that this is a more accurate representation of market cap (view by total supply): http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/market-cap-by-tota... That one is going to be fun if we
58.
by vbuterin 12y ago
They also only need one connection; they can simply split the data across all the workers. They will need to send shares from all the workers if they're not solo mining, but even those are less than 100 bytes each, and if that becomes
59.
by vbuterin 12y ago
Okay how about I'll send you a contract to transfer all of your property to me and then you'll be free to spend the rest of your life in the Amazon rainforest. If you get malaria, don't worry, it's natural. Just learn to
60.
Show HN: Rushwallet, URL-based 100% client-side instant Bitcoin wallet(rushwallet.com)
14 points by vbuterin 12y ago|0 comments

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