_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?
gklitz wrote 28 min ago:
Does this mean that I can finally buy a cup of coffee with crypto at
that one crypto cafe? Does it even still exist?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
Wish all cryptobros get 25 years behind bars. Enough of their rat
poison on HN.
orbisvicis wrote 12 hours 47 min ago:
I don't understand half of this. How do I go from "yay, I read the
bitcoin paper" to this? A single comprehensive resource so I'm not
hoovering crumbs from site to site.
ipnon wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
There is a lot to learn but it's all well-organized here: [1] It
would take even a bright student a year or two to go through all of
this so pick and choose as you see fit. a16z has an excellent AI
canon as well for self-study:
URI [1]: https://a16z.com/tag/the-canons/
URI [2]: https://a16z.com/ai-canon/
Cloudef wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
Maybe ETH should focus on solving their scaling so the layer 1 doesn't
cost arm and leg to do transfer on. Layer 2 becoming expensive as well
and people already talking about Layer 3.
kinakomochidayo wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
Eventually, statelessness will help increase gas limit on L1.
However, Ethereum L1 is supposed to be the settlement layer for
rollups, and high security requirement transactions, not for shitcoin
trading.
Recursive rollups (L3s,L4s) have also been talked about for years
now, and it should be pursued; that's how you can increase
transaction throughput and decrease fees with the magic of zk.
wslh wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
Do I understand well that this update implies low fees for rollups but
not for native Ethereum transactions themselves?
leashless wrote 16 hours 9 min ago:
7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to
where
the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in
1995
and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous
in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows
for the
immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial
and
consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what
has occurred.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and
Wales,
I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and
reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the
internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the
reputation
and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and
Wales.
9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in
â¬600 trillion
of OTC derivatives annually, in â¬11.6 trillion in metals trading, in
£250
billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every
year â
just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to
be
the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up
grows
exponentially in the months and years to come. [1] Case closed.
URI [1]: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-MR-...
Shawnj2 wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
I still donât understand what a fully realized crypto ecosystem
would allow people to do that isnât already being done well by
standard technology. Like it or not, for most people doing most
things, the government or large companies are suitable enough of a
store of trust which is the problem crypto solves by being
decentralized. I think itâs a neat technology for tech people but I
still struggle to see why normal people doing most things would want
to pay for things with bitcoin.
ericyd wrote 17 hours 59 min ago:
By far my biggest takeaway from skimming the first ~10-15 paragraphs is
that there is significantly too much jargon in the crypto space.
everfree wrote 17 hours 39 min ago:
This is a highly technical article written by a protocol researcher
to be read by other protocol researchers and implementers. I'm not
really sure what level of jargon you expected.
This article is akin to an aircraft architect writing about engine
design to engine manufacturers - there's no reason to spell things
out that the target audience already knows well.
ericyd wrote 17 hours 5 min ago:
extremely fair point. I was kinda trying to be funny but I also
think I misunderstood the audience of the article
conradev wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools
we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously
cypherpunk and user-friendly.
> The Daimo wallet is explicitly describing itself as Venmo on
Ethereum, aiming to combine Venmo's convenience with Ethereum's
decentralization
I will forever point this out, but Venmo has a âPrivateâ setting.
Your balance on Ethereum is public, as is any transaction you send.
It just isnât a viable replacement for cash
throwaway22032 wrote 19 hours 37 min ago:
People who still think cryptocurrency is pointless are like
fundamentalist Christians saying that condoms are pointless.
You're trying to imagine away the use cases because you don't agree
with them.
digger495 wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
They should shove it waaaaay up their butthole.
ForHackernews wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
> On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the
long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844,
aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups
by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we
finally saw blobs spike up in volume and the fee market activate as the
blobscriptions protocol started to use them. Blobs are not free, but
they remain much cheaper than calldata.
> proto-danksharding
> rollups
> blobscriptions
> calldata
I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his
disciples, but we are deep deep into "how many angels can dance on the
head of a pin?" territory here.
Does anyone know if you can use multiple slurp juices on a single
danksharded blob?
everfree wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
Typically when there's a highly technical topic on HN that I don't
understand, I don't comment on the thread about the domain jargon
going over my head.
I didn't go into today's Babylon thread and comment "Node geometry?
Gaussian splat rendering? We are deep into angels dancing on a pin
territory. Just use jQuery."
I just don't understand the mentality of comments like yours, I
suppose.
ForHackernews wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
I suppose the difference is that in most technical topics the
complexity is either inherent (quantum mechanics just is this way)
or exists for a good reason (consensus algorithms are complicated
but they solve a hard problem).
IMHO this is not true in cryptocurrency, which is more akin to a
self-sustaining pyramid scheme where the complexity serves to
obscure the reality of the thing and draw in more rubes. All the
nonsensical jargon around NFTs was trying to hide the fact that
paying money for a URL to a jpeg of a monkey is stupid. As best I
can gather, all this new "layer 2" nonsense is to try and hide the
fact that blockchain is a slow, crappy database.
bawolff wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
> Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem. It's a
full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech", and even
provides some things that centralized tech does not (eg.
governance-related applications). And we need to build with this
broader ecosystem in mind.
I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few
cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as
they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity
and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could
already do much better using traditional technologies.
What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
xotesos wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional
technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on
top of it.
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to
obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win
the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with
such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and
crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the
state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of
a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research
in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started
for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be
marketed.
Destiner wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
Here's an elevator pitch. Your twitter/facebook/github account gets
banned, what do you do? With farcaster/lens/radicle, it's impossible.
Shawnj2 wrote 10 hours 12 min ago:
ActivityPub solves this problem without using crypto
threeseed wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
The problem you have is that 99.999% of people aren't getting
banned.
And of those remaining the overwhelming majority deserve it.
So you're trying to convince people to adopt Etheruem, Blockchain
etc to solve a problem no one has.
defiamazing wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
The blockchain's security depends on native token value and the
native token is a memecoin with no backing and if there's a
speculative dump then the network has no security, so no not quite
impossible.
DennisP wrote 17 hours 6 min ago:
ETH is not a memecoin and it has a real economic model. It's used
to pay transaction fees, which are mostly burned. There's a small
amount of issuance but most of the time that's less than the
burn, so the supply shrinks. You can model it as a company, where
fee burn is revenue, issuance is cost, the net is earnings, and
earnings are distributed to ETH holders like a company doing
stock buybacks. You can calculate a PE ratio; when I checked
sometime last year the PE was around 100.
defiamazing wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
Having an economic model doesn't make it not a memecoin. LINK
has an economic model and most would agree that there's no
reason for it to exist other than to dump on retail. The burn
is there in large part to enshrine ETH so that investors can
dump on retail, otherwise fees could be paid in other ways. It
provides no liquidation or dividend rights. The closest thing
to that is rights to MEV, which the base fee controller
actively prevents. Value is speculative and if it went to zero
then the network would completely die unless it forked to
disable the burn.
DennisP wrote 15 hours 49 min ago:
You need ETH to pay transaction fees. As long as there's more
demand for blockspace than the space available, ETH will have
a non-speculative value.
The reason for the burn was the 1559 upgrade, which fixed the
horrible user experience of guessing what minimum fee level
would get your transaction through in a timely manner, and
often either overpaying, or underpaying and suffering long
delays. If not for the fee burn, the 1559 protocol would be
trivial for validators to exploit.
defiamazing wrote 14 hours 3 min ago:
Basically you're arguing for chartalism, it has value
because validators say it's the only thing they'll accept.
That can change at any time, it's not the same as a
company's stock's value being backed by liquid revenue.
Imagine situations where the network just decides they want
to accept other tokens at the expense of ETH. Imagine what
happens to network security if there's a huge speculative
dump - would network hard fork to avoid other protocols
getting owned? What happens to ETH then?
DennisP wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
Not at all. The validators get a small portion of the
transaction fee for themselves and certainly they could
ask for something different. But the ETH burn is built
into the protocol. In theory that could be changed, if
you got agreement not just from validators but from the
rest of the ecosystem too. But nobody wants to change it.
1559 became very popular within days of hitting
production, since it improved user experience so much.
And the bigger the ecosystem gets, the harder it is to
make fundamental changes.
But sure, in theory all the protocol rules could be
changed. In theory Bitcoin could change their 21M supply
limit. In theory, a company could sell its fixed assets
and pivot to an entirely different business, or the US
could change its constitution and take away property
rights. But in practice, we usually estimate values based
on the way things are working now, and put little weight
on unlikely fundamental changes that might happen
someday.
defiamazing wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
The difference is that the US would not do that in
response to a speculative dump. With ETH, the system
stops working and everything breaks without a HF. So
itâs valuable because itâs valuable.
If the company pivoted to a different business, it
would likely violate securities laws. Corporate
governance is in place to stop that from happening.
US taking away all property rights is significantly
less likely than an ETH hard fork. Hard forks have
happened.
Ecosystem is getting smaller because everyone knows
there are currently no useful DeFi projects. ETH is
failing to pump again so this is the peak of network
security.
Bitcoin is also a memecoin for the same reason, but at
least itâs a credibly neutral memecoin unlike ETH.
DennisP wrote 58 min ago:
Ethereum would not stop working just due to a price
crash. It would get cheaper for an attacker to
purchase majority stake, but good luck purchasing
that much without making the price go back up.
bawolff wrote 18 hours 39 min ago:
Join mastadon?
thisgoesnowhere wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
Direct RSS from the source does this as well. What's the
difference?
mattdesl wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
RSS isnât a social media protocol with follows, comments,
usernames, etc.
smoovb wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
My (non-crypto) company uses USDC daily on L2 Arbitrum for
international settlement, and have seen the fees drop to a few cents
per transaction with the release of blobs. We have replaced the need
for wires/TransferWise/Revolut on several of our routes.
defiamazing wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
There is absolutely no reason for USDC to be on a blockchain other
than to interact with DeFi. Once DeFi hype dies USDC will be
outcompeted by a centralized solution. It's multisig controlled
anyway so it's the same thing.
everfree wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
Why is it that no other solution has been developed in the 40
years of the internet, but you believe now is a particularly ripe
time for one to pop up?
defiamazing wrote 18 hours 7 min ago:
Because there's not enough demand to justify the regulatory
headache for most types of international payments, unless you
have the added benefit of interacting with DeFi protocols
during a massive shitcoin bubble.
everfree wrote 17 hours 45 min ago:
Sorry, but I thought you said in your last comment that you
believe USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution.
Do you believe that, or do you believe that there is not
enough demand to justify the regulatory headache of launching
a centralized solution? Those seem to me to be opposing
viewpoints.
defiamazing wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
Yes, because Circle will either start using whitelists at
which point it will shrink to the point where competition
is trivial or it'll just shut down completely. If for some
reason there's massive demand in the next decade for
sub-minute international money transfers then surely
CashApp will get back on that. There's just not, existing
slower solutions work fine in most cases and not enough
people need something better.
Also important to emphasize, I know I said it'll be
outcompeted by a centralized solution. But actually USDC
is centralized because it has a multisig, and all of its
contracts are 100% upgradeable. So it's like a very
inefficient centralized solution that really doesn't belong
on a blockchain or at least not a popular one with high
fees. But again, DeFi protocols exist, and people want to
swap USDC for crypto hedge funds to frontrun.
arandomusername wrote 18 hours 39 min ago:
Sending USD across countries, e.g from EU to US, is a LOT easier
and faster with USDC than any other solution out there.
defiamazing wrote 18 hours 22 min ago:
That's because it has regulatory approval (for now). It's not
because of a blockchain.
You can start the thought experiment by asking why USDC is on
Ethereum and other popular chains rather than own private
blockchain. People could make payments faster. Fees would be
lower or more likely zero.
arandomusername wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
If it's not because of a blockchain, how come there is no
other good way?
It's not on it's own private blockchain because then no one
would use it.
threeseed wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
If my aim is transfer money internationally cheaply and
efficiently why do I care what blockchain it uses. Or
whether it uses a blockchain at all.
nikita_789 wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
You don't have to use blockchain, you can use payment
systems like Arbonum.
defiamazing wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
No one would use it because people don't actually want to
send money internationally badly enough to create a profit
opportunity. They want to interact with DeFi protocols,
that's why USDC exists on eth, once the DeFi protocols die
then so will USDC.
There's no good other way because people don't actually
want to send money internationally badly enough to create a
profit opportunity.
anonymousDan wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
Awesome. Can I ask the name of your company?
kinakomochidayo wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
> What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
> It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech"
Anti-censorship, permissionless data that lasts longer than
centralized companies..?
Version467 wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on
its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all
drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real
world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for
speculative investment.
With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for
crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only
ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core
technology.
Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This
sentence stood out to me:
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools
we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously
cypherpunk and user-friendly. And so we should go out and do it.
Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as
a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot
of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and
Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain,
which is yet another tool and not an application.
I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer,
and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about
the topics he writes about.
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
A "solution" looking for a problem.
halfcat wrote 14 hours 15 min ago:
Is running an app on ethereum still over 100x the cost to run it on,
say, AWS?
I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but
realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable
ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets
or whatever.
I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a
cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.
shermantanktop wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
And the only real-world, non-criminal users of cryptocurrency are
cryptocurrency speculators. To an approximation, anyway.
SergeAx wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
Does moving funds between compartmentalized economies count as
"currency" use? I know quite a few cases of using it to move money
from Russia or China.
kjkjadksj wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
I think thats only a subset of people offshoring money. Many more
who might have more means and therefore more pressure to offshore
that means would probably opt to offshore that money by buying a
vancouver condo they will never see.
wslh wrote 18 hours 2 min ago:
And Zcash and others doing the same?
qweqwe14 wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
They aren't. Zcash has opt-in privacy, which I think we've
established doesn't work. By this logic BTC also has opt-in privacy
â just use a mixer. Well, except that your BTC will be tainted if
you do it, which effectively makes BTC non-fungible for all intents
and purposes.
The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make
privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a
drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is
automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to
have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into
"normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
godelski wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
> Zcash has opt-in privacy
You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too.
And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs.
Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which
is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need
deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're
doing with your money.
qweqwe14 wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
> Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability
So if you actually want to interact with the real world, you
have to opt out of privacy? And if you enable privacy you are
automatically treated as a weirdo? I don't get the whole point
of Zcash.
It's the same issue as with Bitcoin â you can make your
transactions private, but it's not the default and not obvious
for new users, and anyone who does it is subject to suspicion.
It really looks to me like this "privacy" aspect of Zcash is
just a marketing gimmick. It doesn't have any advantages to
just using Monero in the first place.
godelski wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
Shielded by default or opt in depends on the wallet you use.
As you can imagine, a lot of people like shielded by default.
There are reasons to have transparent transactions btw. You
may want public proof.
Again, it is not the same as bitcoin. Using a mixer does not
come with ZKPs. The transactions are also still public. You
can see how much was put in and how much was taken out.
Worse, you now potentially have traceable tainted coins and a
target on your back.
The point of Zcash is the Z. Zero knowledge proofs. Monero
uses differential privacy. Zcash has much stronger privacy
guarantees.
__MatrixMan__ wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
I think it's more useful to think of ZCash's featureset not as
privacy defaulting to on or off, but as giving you the option to
have pseudonyms.
If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able
to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your
anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in
accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash
transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that
division between transparent and opaque.
As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack.
Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use
the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a
space where they can do that, and then you as a user can
privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a
black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other
exchange.
Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx
by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy
properties with different use cases.
Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's
fantastic.
wslh wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
Grin's Mimblewimble?
golergka wrote 18 hours 13 min ago:
> As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually
delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero.
In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air
conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some
goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for
exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) â all in USDT.
I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he
couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point,
most of services in local community are advertised with payment in
USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on
trc-20.
Solvency wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
Yeah where do you live, Izhevsk Russia or something?
golergka wrote 16 hours 54 min ago:
Buenos Aires, and yes â community of (mostly political) Russian
immigrants. I don't think USDT gets much use in Izhevsk though,
Russian local financial services are pretty good, especially
compared to Europe or US.
throw-the-towel wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
Even the local businesses in Argentina sometimes accept crypto.
I've seen a clothes shop in Jujuy that had a sign claiming to
accept Bitcoin.
medellin wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
I mean i have been using bitcoin for the past 6 years to send money
to people outside the country with little issue.
I know itâs hard to imagine for the west but places exist where
working around the local financial system is a huge benefit.
sfjailbird wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
And lots of people pay for lots of things with bitcoin, today. It
works fine, even if the confirmation takes 15-20 minutes and it
costs five bucks. For some things where you prefer discretion, it's
fine.
For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem
for a long time.
Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons,
and ignorant at the same time.
kemotep wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
In your opinion is it possible for someone to be sour on
cryptocurrency without being ignorant about how it works?
shuntress wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
The "Killer App" for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it
as a currency.
lesuorac wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
I'm really surprised sellers aren't trying to use it at all. There
was a small push awhile ago ~2015/16 where a bunch of online stores
started accepting bitcoin but IIRC they all stopped once the
BTC/USD started to decrease.
I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough
discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get
crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a
chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could
benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.
SamPatt wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
The high bitcoin fees killed adoption more than the price drop.
I worked on OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace using
bitcoin, and no one wants to spend $5 just to buy something.
Artificially reducing block sizes killed adoption.
evantbyrne wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one
in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for
instance might take a minute. For lower value point of sale
transactions you don't really have to wait. And that's money in
your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at
a US bank. Paying capital gains on transactions and constantly
changing value dampens adoption quite a bit though
zachmu wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
The article boasts of ethereum L2 being able to support 500 TPS
thanks to blobs.
That's at least two decimal orders of magnitude away from being a
global payment solution. It's a joke.
chrispeel wrote 20 min ago:
Where did you get that number?
Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a
compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000
transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.
zachmu wrote 7 min ago:
I would have sworn I read it in the linked article, but it's
sure not there when I read it again. And it's not in the
oldest archive.org copy either. I can only conclude I
hallucinated it, which makes me uncomfortable.
godelski wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
I don't want instant transactions. Clawbacks are very useful. Now
the trick is to get that decentralized which means things like
smart contracts? But still I haven't seen a good solution.
evantbyrne wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
Well everyone pays an extra ~3% on all of their transactions
for that privilege, plus whatever costs retailers factor in for
rampant credit card fraud. I wouldn't consider Visa the gold
standard of how financial transactions should work the whole
system is very clunky and prone to abuse.
godelski wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
> Well everyone pays an extra ~3%
You do realize crypto currencies have transaction fees,
right?
Yes, I'm willing to pay for goods and services.
threeseed wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
> And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a
pending transaction at a US bank
In Australia, we have instant transfers between bank accounts.
I imagine the US will get to that point soon in which case there
is no benefit to crypto for this use case.
govg wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
It exists in the US as well (Zelle), except due to the super
high number of banks, not all will have feature parity / have
it enabled. The major banks like Chase support QR code scanning
for instant transfers, smaller ones might require a phone
number or email input via keyboard.
kjkjadksj wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
Venmo is probably even more popular than zelle
shuntress wrote 19 hours 52 min ago:
You could maybe call it a technical issue or an issue of adoption
but the fact is that no one is scanning Monero wallet QR codes to
buy coffee.
evantbyrne wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
Capital gains tax is not a technical issue per se. People also
don't buy coffee with wire transfers, but nobody says wire
transfers are a failure. btc/eth are better at doing what wire
transfers were designed to do. The point is the tech is much
better than people who have been sleeping on crypto seem to
realize
shuntress wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
Wire Transfers are a logistic service you may have someone
perform for you in exchange for cash.
Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a
wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash
directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope
full of physical cash.
The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back
into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing
with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If
you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for
expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they
need to first convert that into a real currency before they
can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The
'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use
it as a currency".
joshspankit wrote 14 hours 45 min ago:
Something that has likely slowed down adoption: Current
payment methods (CC, debit, tap, chip, etc) artificially
appear faster than they are.
When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is
not waiting for the funds. Itâs all trust and calculations
of acceptable risk (thatâs why the tap limit).
Crypto can adopt that approach as well.
Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where
that trust was wildly abused and itâs likely any trust
layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same
period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented
fairly quickly since itâs all tech.
evantbyrne wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
Yup. eth transactions could happen in the time it takes to
run a credit card if you wait for just a couple
confirmations, which should be acceptable risk for point of
sale. Bitcoin has lightning.
As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant
and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b
transactions. The issues with those technologies are
technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't
allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like
those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even
exist in a secure transaction system by default is
debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court
service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about
all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't
related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain
they are not worth 3% of your total spending.
hunter-gatherer wrote 16 hours 38 min ago:
This was my use case for bitcoin years ago when my wife and I
had just got married. She is a foreigner and was finishing
school, so I'd sometimes send her bitcoin instead of wire.
Back then bitcoin was only worth a few hundred, and sending
her a 1-3 hundred a month is what she needed. To wire 300
dollars is simply not worth it, at least back then. I'm not
sure if it has changed at all now though.
maxcoder4 wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
As the OP said, the cryptocurrency you're looking for is Monero.
shuntress wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
"Bitcoin but its anonymous" does not make Monero a real currency.
I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.
But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store,
buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously
disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to
give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through
making a new account with some new app which they won't do
because it's pointless anyways.
maxcoder4 wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
I can't walk into a store and pay with USD either. It doesn't
mean USD is not a currency, it's just not usually accepted by
stores in my country.
I use Monero semi-regularly to pay for things online (usually
privacy products, because sadly nobody is interested in selling
me groceries in exchange for xmr). You can absolutely buy
things with it.
abnercoimbre wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
> usually privacy products
Could you offer examples? Straight-up curious.
prussia wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
Njalla (domain names, VPSes, VPN), and Mullvad (VPN) both
accept Monero.
monero-xmr wrote 17 hours 37 min ago:
URI [1]: https://kycnot.me/
arandomusername wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
"I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a
store and pay using my credit card. And if I want to send some
money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a
bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway
and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill" - Someone years
ago.
Do you expect every store to start accepting it instantly?
Your argument does not disqualify Monero as a real currency. It
is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just
because you don't find use for it in your life does not
disqualify it.
shuntress wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
This is not an appropriate comparison.
> I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a
store and pay using my credit card
That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as
it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I
can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to
say.
> And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to
walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't
do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the
$50 dollar bill"
This is completely disconnected from reality. People very
commonly use bank accounts and checks. I know they must exist
but I cant think of a single person in my life who would need
my help dealing with a check.
> It is a real currency, it's used every day for
transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your
life does not disqualify it.
You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't
make it a real currency.
DJHenk wrote 11 hours 24 min ago:
Monero is nine years old, Bitcoin is fifteen years old.
I looked up the history of the credit card on Wikipedia to
see how fast that caught on. It seems it had a slow start as
well. Things only changed when a big bank put all of its
weight behind it. I don;t think something like that will ever
happen with cryptocoins, since there are no big institutions
that would benefit from it becoming widespread.
486sx33 wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
Shopify for monero is an idea being kicked around, there are
also monero marketplaces for non- illegal things
Monero could be used in a store and some stores do take monero!
Its quick, with low fees
tayo42 wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
Is moner just quick for now but as it scales it'll be slow
like bitcoin? Or is there something unique about monero that
makes it fast?
arcticbull wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
> Or is there something unique about monero that makes it
fast?
The fact people aren't using it. It's just a PoW coin with
some special sauce. Same grey goo energy and equipment
dynamics.
shuntress wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
It's maybe quick with low fees now while no one is using it.
It has the exact same practical problems every other
distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being
useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing
adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like
Bitcoin.
grigio wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
yep, Monero is the CBDC cure, what Bitcoin wanted to be in the origin
gehwartzen wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
>As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers
on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all
drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real
world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle
for speculative investment.
This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and
it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on
amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find
something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more
of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between
paying, shipping, and fund-release.
coffeebeqn wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
So you pay with monero but you still need to give them an address
to ship to which some probably store somewhere where the police
might eventually find it ?
I guess depending on the local police the chances of that leading
to any trouble are lower than getting stabbed by a tweaker when you
go out into the community to purchase your stuff
dqft wrote 11 hours 24 min ago:
If someone sends any comm without PGP or I heard a vendor they
are not using it witb someone else and I'm never interacting
again. It really is that simple!
idlewords wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
The risk is not just 'stabbed by a tweaker' but 'surprise
fentanyl'. And police are very unlikely to come after some random
online buyer who is not distributing/reselling.
reaperman wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
[1] You can get quantitative GC/MS tests in addition to
fentanyl / nitazene test strips.
URI [1]: https://energycontrol-international.org/drug-testing-s...
kjkjadksj wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
If your sample is cross contaminated with fentanyl e.g. from
a scale there is a chance the portion of the sample you sent
for testing doesnât have any fentanyl. These arenât
homogeneously mixed substances its someone loading a dime bag
in a bedroom.
numpad0 wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
I've heard that drug abusers exploit legally protected status of
snail mail to avoid search, and have substances sent to an
innocent third party as a dead drop or a dummy address to be
intercepted. I'd assume authorities will get to you anyway,
though.
jen729w wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
> abusers
Excuse me.
arandomusername wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
Would probably be a lot harder for police to do anything since
you could argue someone else did it in an attempt to get you in
trouble or whatever.
Semionilo wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
Yes you can argue like this and I thought about it when I got a
letter.
The issue is that if it's too much they will still raid your
place even if the evidence might not be that clear and they
might ignore politicians.
Good luck defending this, it will still be annoying as fuck If
your PC is gone for month
arandomusername wrote 16 hours 40 min ago:
You got a letter warning you?
If they had proof you paid you would probably be in jail.
Can still be painful, but way better than if they had proof
you bought it.
(Also, if any of your drugs dont arrive or were opened, never
order any more)
Semionilo wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
It was for 5g and I have no record.
It was from the state and it was dropped.
486sx33 wrote 21 hours 4 min ago:
+1 for monero
rglullis wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
One of the things that made me less skeptical of Ethereum was that
Vitalik has consistently argued based on his view of "Ether as
digital oil to power the blockchain", which is to say that the point
is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable
different applications.
I still think that we should not forget the "I need a
censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but
mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an
immediate need.
wslh wrote 17 hours 59 min ago:
The problem is that this gospel has been said for almost a decade
now and despite, literally, billion dollars of assets that Vitalik
has, and others flowing this is not happening.
Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but
cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution
basic practices.
As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group
of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For
example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum
protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
skybrian wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
It does seem slow, but they did manage the proof-of-stake
transition pretty smoothly despite delays and widespread
skepticism, so I give them some credit for that.
I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
wslh wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
He was talking about proof-of-stake since the beginning and
every year was talking about the next year. Not blaming Vitalik
himself but the whole thing, it is bad to give false
expectations.
Another thing, no pun intended, is that the proof-of-stake
upgrade maintains prohibitive the network fees for transactions
while other technologies have low fees.
> I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
The funding of projects is through the foundation but if I
remember well the original people and contributors received the
~50% of the total ethers until now.
rglullis wrote 15 hours 43 min ago:
> proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive
Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction
fees.
> while other technologies have low fees.
Any "Ethereum killer" that showed up turned out to have the
same if not worse problems as Ethereum in the moment they
started dealing with minimal real-world traction.
> contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until
now.
First: source?
Second: "50% of total ETH until now" is doing a lot of work
here. How much was during the pre-mine and how much was due
to the sale? The pre-mine sale raised < 20 million USD. Are
you counting the people who bought ETH in the pre-mine as
"original contributors"?
wslh wrote 14 hours 10 min ago:
> Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction
fees.
Please don't tell bullshit. Look at Algorand and other
protocols, consensus has a relationship with fees because
it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
You can even read that in the Ethereum subreddit [0].
> Source?
It is repeated ad nauseam in Internet [1] and you can
analyze the blockchain genesis to check it.
> Ethereum killer?
It is not about the protocol but the community you create.
Algorand has solved the PoS before Cardano and Ethereum but
they are #58 now and the creator is one of the parents of
modern cryptography, Turing Prize, etc. Solana is #5.
Beyond comparing the Solana protocol with Algorand it is a
matter of "business" execution, technology is a smaller
part. Probably if Livra from Meta was accepted it would be
in the top 10.
Even when you think about Solidity as a programming
language, it was not well designed (e.g. security) but that
doesn't matter.
[0] [1]
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ru9dsq/...
URI [2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+the+origi...
rglullis wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
I asked for "source" because I know that this is
"repeated ad nauseam in the Internet" while being
provably false.
The very first result on your google query is a
bitcoin.com page that is 404, but archive.org has this:
The Ethereum network started off with a supply of 72
million Ether (ETH).
Eighty-three percent of that (60 million) was
distributed to people who had
purchased ETH in a crowd sale that was conducted in
July and August of 2014.
(...)
Of the remaining 12 million ETH distributed at the
launch of the network in 2015,
half was split amongst 83 early contributors to the
protocol based mostly on time
contributed. The other half were set aside for the
Ethereum Foundation.
So, the "50% to contributors" is actually 8.33%.
> consensus has a relationship with fees because it is
linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
Wrong. Fees are determined by network activity and the
amount of transactions competing to get into the block
being "mined". The cost to validate a full block is not
really different than the cost to validate a block that
is not completely full.
If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction
volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average
transaction fees would go up accordingly.
wslh wrote 7 hours 12 min ago:
You know that Algorand and Solana supports a bigger
number of TPSs that Ethereum and with lower fees and
different consensus mechanisms, if you don't know that
I am talking about someone that tries to show expertise
but don't have any real one. It is a fact.
Initial investors are also contributors. The number
allocated initially is really huge.
rglullis wrote 5 hours 33 min ago:
I also know that Solana had frequent outages and
issues where they could resolve their transaction
sequence, because their hardware and connectivity
requirements make it prohibitive for "casual
enthusiasts" to run a node.
And if "initial investors are also contributors",
then you are just parroting the "Ethereum is
pre-mined" from Bitcoiners, and we can safely end the
discussion here.
wslh wrote 5 hours 12 min ago:
Again you are not following the argument, you
cherry picked Solana, Algorand didn't have any
issue. Follow logical argumentation please...
rglullis wrote 3 hours 45 min ago:
I didn't mention Algorand because its overall
network is a blip compared with Ethereum and
Solana in any metric, and it can barely be
considered as Battle-Tester in a "real world"
scenario.
wslh wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
Do you have a paper for that?
pcthrowaway wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
> If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the
transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that
their average transaction fees would go up accordingly.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't know about
Algorand or Cardano transaction volume, but many
EVM-based blockchains process a similar number of
transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees.
They do all have different (proof of stake still)
consensus models though
For comparison: [1] Polygon: [2] Polygon is an L2, so
arguably not as decentralized.
But then there's Avalanche: [3] Or Fantom:
URI [1]: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
URI [2]: https://polygonscan.com/chart/tx
URI [3]: https://avascan.info/stats/network-activity
URI [4]: https://ftmscan.com/chart/tx
rglullis wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
Let's get Polygon out, because they are not a
base-layer blockchain.
> a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or
more), with lower fees.
Are we talking about the base currency (Wei) or the
dollar-equivalent amount? If Wei, the only way that
the transaction fees can be lower is if the chain has
a different set of costs for the operations.
If you are talking about the dollar-equivalent
amount, then yes, transactions are going to be "more
expensive". But even then, it is not related to the
consensus algorithm and just the "price of the base
token".
pcthrowaway wrote 5 hours 47 min ago:
Transaction volume meaning.. the number of
transactions processed by the network?
If you meant monetary volume, you should have used
a different term than one which is well-recognized
to refer to the number of transactions (both in and
out of blockchain applications of that term)
edit: I see, you're suggesting the fees are cheaper
because the token is cheaper, and somehow seem to
think EVM networks will have a straightforward
relationship between the number of transactions and
the cost denominated in their gas token.
I don't see how this follows. The fees are entirely
a function of network constants and usage, which
have more to do with what people are willing to pay
to get their transaction into a block.
Ethereum has a limited amount of block-space, and a
fixed number of blocks per year. The gas price
isn't entirely a bidding system, because there's
basically a floating multiplier which adjusts
automatically based on the "fullness" of the most
recent however many blocks, but the principle is
that you need some form of congestion control
In blockchains which have larger blocks, or more
numerous blocks, or a number of blocks/block-size
which adjust based on usage, it is not as costly to
get a transaction included.
So I don't know about Cardano or Algorand, but many
networks can handle as many transactions as
ethereum while having much cheaper transaction
fees, which seemed to be the point you were arguing
against
willmadden wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
That's what Bitcoin used to be about, before its development team
was taken over and it was crippled.
rglullis wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
Bitcoin original plan was about "digital cash", it was fully
focused on permissionless payments, but that's about it.
willmadden wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
The whitepaper's plan wasn't, but that's not true at all for
Bitcoin itself. Satoshi included OP_RETURN which allowed smart
contracts - mastercoin being the first L2 (on Bitcoin). He also
wanted to increase the blocksize to allow scaling. Vitalik
started Ethereum because the "core devs" (bank incumbent funded
usurpers) refused to cooperate. This is also the reason the
original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to
Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
pcthrowaway wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
> Vitalik started Ethereum because the "core devs" (bank
incumbent funded usurpers) refused to cooperate
I agree with everything about the bastardization of Bitcoin,
but I don't think this is why Vitalik created Ethereum
willmadden wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
It is. He saw how badly the "core developers" were treating
counterparty. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7umljb/vital...
URI [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/co...
midmagico wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
This is all pretty much boring, tired lies that altcoin
profiteers like to trot out apparently assuming nobody is
still around who is interested in contradicting them.
The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not
designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless;
Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguousârather than say
it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you
could break consensus by simply setting the value higher.
There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and
anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin,
and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often
debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik
himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested
in "cooperating" and then core turned him down.
His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data
into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing
the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by halfâfrom 80 to
40 bytesâbut when he says that he also never points at any
discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts
thisâno versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced
anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80
in released versions.
There no evidence these people ever give which shows some
lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and
Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is
quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have
been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..
willmadden wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
This is the same tired misinformation you are spreading
from 2017+ and I will prove it with primary sources.
Also, why are the comments on your account 90% calling
other people liars about cryptocurrency?
Satoshi's views on scaling were NOT ambiguous. He planned
to increase the blocksize and have users switch to SPV
wallets. Read section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper: [1]
Also, direct Satoshi quote from bitcointalk about
increasing the blocksize and hard forking to do it: [2] "It
can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it
reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older
versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert
to old versions to make sure they know they have to
upgrade."
Regarding OP_RETURN, both mastercoin and counterparty
existed because of OP_RETURN, so no, it's not "garbage".
It's a data field that can be used to link L2's to the
Bitcoin blockchain by embedding them in transactions. These
projects, factom, and countless others that built off of
OP_RETURN had to abandon Bitcoin for other chains because
of the core developers' gatekeeping.
URI [1]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
URI [2]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15...
rglullis wrote 16 hours 10 min ago:
> original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to
Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
So what developments in Bitcoin Cash have been made in that
direction? Why is is that all of the "ideological" forks of
Bitcoin do nothing but tweak some parameter size in the
network settings and do not go beyond that?
willmadden wrote 3 hours 39 min ago:
The development roadmap for these cryptocurrencies are
documented and available with an internet search...
PKop wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
>the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology
that can enable different applications
This is has been said about every coin since the beginning of
crypto.
rglullis wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
Absolutely not. Bitcoin's initial narrative was "digital cash",
i.e, digital payments and microtransactions. Given that
transaction costs became prohibitive, it switched to "digital
gold", or store of value, meaning that Bitcoiners defend the idea
that Bitcoin's reason d'être is just to hold it.
I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers
talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of
any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of
the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.
PKop wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
You gave 2 examples supporting exactly what I just said.
And there are 1000s of other ones that encompass "crypto".
rglullis wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
I'm really failing to understand you here.
The "beginning of crypto" was with Bitcoin, can we agree to
that?
Can we agree that Bitcoin was not claiming to "be a general
platform to power distributed applications"? If you disagree,
refer to the whitepaper that says "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic
Cash System".
Can we agree that before Ethereum each chain was just a fork
of Bitcoin, and that the token (aka "the currency") was
"sold" to others as something that would have its value
determined by supply and demand, but that the blockchain had
no use that was not connected to transactions related to the
token? As in: fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin, Litecoin,
Dogecoin, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash... are the same?
Can we agree that Ethereum (the blockchain) enables
distributed applications where people do not care at all
about the price of Ether? E.g, I can host files on Storj and
pay with credit card, the people hosting data are being paid
in Storj's token, and everyone involved in this economy is
directly using the Ethereum blockchain, but don't need to
hold any Ether at all?
PKop wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
Every coin at one point said it wasn't just for hodling,
including as you pointed out BTC and ETH.
Saying you have some other use case besides asset
appreciation is not a unique proposition.
rglullis wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
BTC (and derivatives) were very much "just for holding".
The fact that they hoped it could be used for day-to-day
value transfers does not negate the fact that the system
can only work with a continuous influx of capital. "You
should pay something with BTC, but if possible buy back
the USD-equivalent amount" was standard advice already in
2011.
> Saying you have some other use case besides asset
appreciation is not a unique proposition.
Now, it isn't. In 2015, it pretty much was.
PKop wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
>they hoped it could be used for day-to-day value
transfers
And they said this, including Satoshi. Yes they were
wrong, but they said it.
>Now, it isn't
It's never been unique, because every coin has said it
including, as you have mentioned in every response so
far, Bitcoiners.
You've also said Eth guys have said. What are we left
with? Every other **coin has obviously said it. I'm not
arguing they all mean it, or they've been right. I'm
arguing they all said it.
rglullis wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
> I'm not arguing they all mean it, or they've been
right. I'm arguing they all said it.
Then this whole discussion is pointless. Why should
we care about what people say or believe, unless it
can be backed by their actions?
Instead of putting them all in the same bucket
because on what they said, let's judge them based on
what they did. And Vitalik has consistently shown
that his work is aligned with the stated plans and
vision for Ethereum.
pavlov wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
> âEther as digital oil to power the blockchainâ
This has made you less skeptical of what heâs peddling? That
slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be
selling actual snake oil.
maxcoder4 wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
I'll rephrase a bit for the HN crowd: "The Ethereum currency
(Ether) value proposition is that it is used to pay for
decentralized apps on the Ethereum Blockchain. The more
application and users are there, the more Ether is needed and
hence it's value goes up". At least that's how I understand it.
OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my
token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I
(like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best,
fraud usually.
kemotep wrote 9 hours 20 min ago:
Should you not want the price to be stable? If an arcade
gameâs price went from 50 cents per play to 5 dollars per
play because more people are using a delivery application on
the other side of the world that doesnât make much sense from
a consumer perspective.
rglullis wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
If the stakes of the arcade game were so high that people
wanted to have its logic running on the base-layer - e.g,
high prizes for winners, or the possibility of using power
ups obtained in other games - then the price to play would
have to depend on the network activity.
But because these games don't, it should be totally fine to
delegate this application to a layer-2 system like a roll-up
or a payment channel.
kemotep wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
But does the layer 2 coin have a stable exchange rate with
the layer 1 coin?
And again, we are talking about just to pay to play the
game. Today an arcade that uses dollars may charge you 50
cents for a life. Or the equivalent in tokens (layer 2). If
suddenly the value of 50 cents could pay for 10 lives, do I
need to now charge customers more tokens to play? How do I
plan long term with hiring or my utilities if the price I
could be paying month to month can fluctuate as much as
cryptocurrency does?
rglullis wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
Why not just use a stable currency to price your "game
token"? Once you are out of the base layer, there is no
need to tie any transaction costs to the base layer
token.
So, in your example, the game company could easily just
say "pay us X amount of dollars however you want, and you
will receive the exact same amount on the layer-2 to
play".
kemotep wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
I feel like we are right back to why even bother using
cryptocurrency for this if the fundamentals of it
arenât stable enough for day to day transactions.
My example was talking about using a layer 2 token. Now
youâre telling me that itâs simple just use a
completely different currency to buy tokens?
pcthrowaway wrote 8 hours 28 min ago:
There are definitely bitcoin diehards out there who look at
the price of everything relative to bitcoin.
From a practical standpoint, I think most people would prefer
it if the currency used by their country of residence
increased in value relative to other global currencies,
rather than just staying stable (though for hyperinflationary
countries, even that would be a major improvement).
Although stability relative to another currency (see [1] ) is
considered (by many) disadvantageous for countries with
strong economies, because you strip away the central bank's
power to manage the supply. This is basically the whole Gold
Standard debate.
For blockchain users who want reduced volatility and
stability relative to a fiat currency, there are always
stablecoins.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_sy...
kemotep wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
But the argument is that the grandparent comment is making
is that you should build your application on the ethereum
network, eth is the âoilâ of this machine, and the more
people who use it the higher the value of eth is.
So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a
global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum
blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less
(or my costs will be higher or lower) depending on how
active the network is.
That makes no sense. Day to day price and gas fee
fluctuations make it hard to long term plan. Just saying
that if you want price stability use a stablecoin doesnât
address that issue because we are not building the app on
the blockchain of the stablecoin. There isnât an eth
stable coin that is always 1 blip to 1 eth exchange rate.
pcthrowaway wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
I don't agree with this, but also think you're arguing a
different point.
My point was that prices being "stable" isn't actually
what's desirable, prices being nonvolatile is.
> So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a
global shipping service
I mean this is exactly how many of these things work.
Uber pricing fluctuates based on demand. So do global
shipping prices in many cases. So do game prices on
Steam.
Even if the price was the same in the currency you're
using (say USD), the value of USD is constantly changing.
> and the more people who use it the higher the value of
eth is.
And I'm not sure how this follows. The more people who
purchase ETH, the higher the value is.
But using the ethereum network doesn't require you to
transact in ETH, only that you pay for the transaction
fee (the network cost that makes it possible to to store
and execute your transaction essentially) in ETH
rglullis wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
> or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the
ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay
more or less (or my costs will be higher or lower)
depending on how active the network is.
Only if you want to have these applications fully running
on the base layer, which is frankly nonsense.
To give you one practical example: Storj can provide a
object storage service at AWS scale, and its pricing has
nothing to do network activity and the price of storage
does not change based on the amount of transactions per
minute. Unless you want to be paid in real-time and
account for every byte that you are storing and
transmitting, there is no need to put all of the business
logic in the blockchain.
kemotep wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
Does Storj use a blockchain at all? It just looks like
cloud storage, denominated in dollars.
pazimzadeh wrote 20 hours 24 min ago:
Actual snake oil has actual benefits. It's fake snake oil you
want to avoid.
Effect of Erabu Sea Snake (Laticauda semifasciata) Lipids on the
Swimming Endurance of Mice
URI [1]: https://karger.com/anm/article-abstract/51/3/281/41756/E...
arcticbull wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
The origin story of the snake oil trope is kinda cool.
Apparently the concept was brought over to the US by Chinese
railroad workers. It was made from the oil of the Chinese water
snake which is high in omega-3's that actually do reduce
inflammation. Unfortunately there were no Chinese water snakes
in America, and the American hucksters started juicing
rattlesnakes. And then... other even cheaper substitutes like
beef tallow, mineral oil and turpentine. [1] I suspect the
Erabu sea snake is the Chinese water snake that was originally
juiced? I don't think rattlesnake oil would have the same
effect :)
URI [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215...
bloppe wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
This is an all-time HN comment
taxmeifyoucan wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
For anyone interested in in-depth details of Ethereum protocol and
upgrades, checkout the Protocol Study Group. Yesterday's presentation
was about scaling and Danksharding, given by its creator
URI [1]: https://epf.wiki/
EMM_386 wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
Hmm ... "proto-danksharding" which activated the "blobscriptions
protocol" so that blobs are "much cheaper than calldata", all of this
helping it to become an "L2-centric ecosystem". In the end, this
leaves them "not confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic
or SNARK-based EVM verifier".
I'm sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.
microtherion wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
Yes, reading TFA left me quite unclear as to how many slurp juices
per ape all this new technology translates into.
monero-xmr wrote 17 hours 33 min ago:
The only reason it's foreign to you is because you are not familiar
with any of the technology. It's no different that having no idea
about LLMs or ML or transformers etc., or if you are not a programmer
than being confused by arrays and recursion and TCP/IP...
Salgat wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
Obviously, the whole point is to tease all this serious discussion
over something that amounts to a toy with almost no practical
application.
PufPufPuf wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
I wouldn't be surprised if all that was just a made up jargon and
this was a joke article. But again, it's about blockchain, so the
line is thin.
Zetaphor wrote 20 hours 27 min ago:
There's actually interesting technology being developed here in the
areas of distributed computation and zero trust systems. The
implementations of Zero Knowledge Proofs and ongoing work on
ZK-SNARKS I personally find most fascinating.
There's a lot more to this ecosystem than just speculation. At it's
core is a distributed world computer but all anyone knows about is
money.exe because this stuff is immensely complex.
If you look into the researcher rather than paying attention to the
soyjack youtube thumbnails you'll find the actual substance. Nobody
is going do the work for you. Or you know, just write it all off
with a snide joke because "crypto bad".
AtlasBarfed wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Since distributed blockchains / databases are distributed and
therefore need partition tolerance by definition, that leaves
consistency or availability for the shortfall in computation.
I'm guessing any "crypto-kinda-currency" is picking eventual
consistency as a core mechanic. Think about the word EVENTUAL
though.
If the core function of the crypto is a ledger, then it makes
sense, it EVENTUALLY gets transacted, and in practical terms you
take the faith in the distributed system from a flawless previous
record in reconciliation, probably before the actual completion
of the transaction.
Now, a distributed major blockchain has ... how many nodes?
Thousands or more? That is a long time for reconciliation of the
consistency, even with great dedicated internal networks. What?
This is over a heterogenous global internet network? That implies
EVENTUAL has some bad worst cases.
"Smart contracts" or "distributed trustless computation".
Whatever, getting the value of calculation from a node and
getting the value stored in the node is essentially the same
thing in terms of determining an answer to a query.
It implies a horrendous performance, one you have little control
over. I don't think Kubernetes is shaking in its boots.
It's interesting Aphyr never does any crypto analyses, although
he makes his bones running a test suite. How do you test a scaled
cryptocurrency?
agumonkey wrote 19 hours 33 min ago:
coti is also using dags for some reason
talldayo wrote 19 hours 49 min ago:
> At it's core is a distributed world computer but all anyone
knows about is money.exe because this stuff is immensely complex.
Alternatively, because the only way to use the aforementioned
distributed world computer is to engage with money.exe and buy
more CoinTokens. Imagine all the kids out there who will be
delighted to learn a pay-per-use code interpreter. "Hey mom, I
need your credit card to cover the gas while I debug my smart
contract."
But assuming you have the money to spend, it's a whole universe
of possibilities! Just make sure to cash in before actually
trying to use any of them.
arandomusername wrote 18 hours 48 min ago:
How did you not realize that one can run/evaluate code without
actually broadcasting it? All you need is access to a node
(plenty of public ones) and you can "simulate" any
transaction(code) you would like.
talldayo wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
Testing a dapp off the mainnet is like ensuring your website
works on localhost. It will find some issues, but it's not
representative of how it will look in deployment.
In any case, for actual usage it should surprise nobody why
everyone conflates Ethereum with money. No, your L2 chain
does not qualify as an official solution.
sainez wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
> Testing a dapp off the mainnet is like ensuring your
website works on localhost
I would argue the exact opposite. A website will be
deployed to different versions of different browsers on
different operating systems. A smart contract will exist on
a single distributed computer. It sounds like the actual
problem is people treating smart contract development as
cavalierly as web app development
arandomusername wrote 16 hours 42 min ago:
No, you can test transactions as they would happen on
mainnet (tests with mainnet state). Or if you want you can
fork mainnet and do your stuff there.
It's absolutely representive of how it looks in deployment.
You can test transactions EXACTLY how they would happen on
mainnet.
I don't get your second point.
Zetaphor wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
The problem with this statement is in assuming that any of this
is actually ready for the average user, like a minor with their
parents credit card. It's really unfortunate that the space
received all of the attention it did during the pandemic, as
that only managed to bring in misaligned expectations fueled by
grifters making impossible claims.
There are a number of planned upgrades on the roadmap[1], such
as layer 2 blobs, that will eventually drive the cost per
transaction closer to zero, however we're still a decade away
from that being the case. In the meantime you can debug your
smart contracts on a testnet for $0
URI [1]: https://notes.ethereum.org/@domothy/roadmap
talldayo wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
Layer 2 blobs aren't even a solution either, arguably. You
have to then engineer the layer 2 bridge to have it's own
anonymization and escrow handling technology that is
disconnected to the Ethereum network entirely. And
realistically speaking, "closer to zero" does not mean free
(or even at negligible cost). L2 chains can only exist when
transactions on the mainnet are made impossible due to
unbalanced gas prices. It's a catch-22.
everfree wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
The actual quote is "we are not *currently* at the point where we can
be confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or
SNARK-based EVM verifier". The article seems to imply that "in the
end", they will be.
PoignardAzur wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
Something tells me that even if/when the optimistic or SNARK-based
EVM verifier is production-ready, the person you're replying to
will still feel somewhat unconvinced.
pa7x1 wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
Very likely, but if they get it sorted out one day he will be
using it without knowing.
If you have no interest whatsoever and they start explaining to
you all the cryptography behind establishing a secure connection
to your bank most people would dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo. But now
you can tell your grandma to look out for the little green lock
on the web that makes her account secure.
EMM_386 wrote 11 hours 53 min ago:
> he will be using it without knowing.
I will know. Not because of the "little green lock".
I will know in the same way I know this site is secure. In
this case, because of PKCS #1 SHA-256 (aka
CKM_SHA1_RSA_PKCS_PSS). Cert issued by DigiCert Global Root G2
and valid until one second before midnight UTC on 3/29/31.
That's where I guess I'm losing sight of the vision.
It's tested, it's proven, it's secure, it works, no "gas", no
fees ... I don't know. Maybe I'm just missing something.
elcritch wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
Unlike the parent, the full quote gives me more confidence that
they're being serious about the upgrades to the Ethereum protocol.
This stuff is all cutting edge distribute systems and
zero-knowledge proofs work, so of course it's going to take a while
to reach confidence in how it'll work.
camillomiller wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
> On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the
long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844,
aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups
by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we
finally saw blobs spike up in volume and the fee market activate as the
blobscriptions protocol started to use them. Blobs are not free, but
they remain much cheaper than calldata.
Can someone please confirm this isnât the incipit from an unpublished
Douglas Adams novel?
everfree wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
Typically when there's a highly technical topic on HN that I don't
understand, I don't comment on the domain jargon.
I didn't go into today's Babylon thread and comment "Node geometry?
Gaussian splat rendering? Sounds like a Douglas Adams novel."
So I guess just don't really understand the mentality.
camillomiller wrote 9 hours 49 min ago:
Chill, I guess?
The technical jargon sounds stylistically a lot more made up and
playful than the one you suggested.
When did HN become so unbearably stuck-up?
Mahn wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
Key quote from the article:
> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the
past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued
against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not
financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high
fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial
speculation!
> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us
back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much
lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money
should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming
true.
---
All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of
UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to
solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say
that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that
anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.
AlienRobot wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
>adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user
Considering there are people who don't understand the bitcoins aren't
INSIDE a physical wallet, that ship has sailed and made a revolution
or two already.
tootie wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
In the many, many years they have spent building a pile of gibberish
tech, traditional finance has begun transitioning to T-0 settlement
on centralized platforms. FedNow is going to replace ACH and wires
and allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
chrisco255 wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
It hasn't at all. If you try to transfer money internationally, you
will still pay huge fees and it will take sometimes days to settle.
Crypto is truly international, and ERC20s like USDC remain fully
programmable in a way that cash will never be. It makes things like
permissionless 24/7 exchanges (see Uniswap) possible. Which is more
than just point to point or account to account transfers. It's an
exchange from one asset to another controlled completely by an
automated market making algorithm. You cannot find that in trad fi.
DennisP wrote 17 hours 11 min ago:
Let me know when FedNow allows me to deploy a smart contract that
moves dollars around according to whatever business rules I like.
SideburnsOfDoom wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
> FedNow is going to allow 24/7 real-time transactions.
Following in the steps of what EU and UK did few years ago. (1)
And which always made this cryptocurrency fast settlement stuff
sound laughable - like they're describing just what a regular bank
account does, and it's supposedly their special magic, so what?
People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state of
the art.
You can even find these systems in Africa already (2)
1) [1] [2] 2)
URI [1]: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_...
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments
URI [3]: https://www.mfw4a.org/news/instant-payment-transactions-af...
everfree wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
> People need to look outside of the USA to understand the state
of the art.
And yet people need only to look down at their smartphone, no
matter where in the world they are located, to understand the
state of the art in public ledgers.
SideburnsOfDoom wrote 8 hours 31 min ago:
Regarding "unbanked" people who are "anywhere in the world" but
have " their smartphone": Cryptocurrency is not only the wrong
product, but also in this case a future functionality would be
the wrong time. The market gap for that has closed already due
to better systems including M-PESA
As I mentioned here: [1] The consistently ignorant rhetoric
here on HN about this supposedly unserved market for
cryptocurrency is discouraging. Again, people need to look
outside of the USA to understand the state of the art.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857944
danpalmer wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
5 cents per transaction is high for many parts of the world, and
exceptionally high if every interaction in normal life is turned into
a financial transaction.
mindcandy wrote 14 hours 52 min ago:
Perfect is the enemy of the great.
Credit card users pay $1+ fees per transaction all the time. They
donât complain only because vendors usually eat the fees on their
behalf to obscure the issue.
I have a â2% cash back on everythingâ card which I know is
actually a âwe charged your vendor 4% and shared half of that
with people like you who clicked the right buttonâ card. I
donât like it. But, thatâs the game.
People complain about the impossibility of crypto having fees of
pennies with settlement times of minutes while constantly using
credit cards that have fees of dollars with a settlement time of
days.
akoboldfrying wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
I totally agree. The perception that, say, credit cards are fast
and free is completely wrong, and based on the comfortably
ignorant idea that things that only impact other people don't
really exist.
If there's one useful thing to take from it, it's that I think it
does usefully highlight just how critical that perception is for
adoption -- specifically, how thoroughly it dominates technical
concerns like throughput and latency. Perhaps if shop owners were
prepared to eat the bitcoin transaction fee the same way they eat
the credit card fee, bitcoin might have a resurgence as a cash
alternative. There would still be the transaction speed issue --
I think it would require a third party to step in to provide
merchants with guarantees (in exchange for a fee), so that the
merchant wouldn't have to wait for the transaction to go through.
But that's not a tech problem -- it's the same problem that
credit cards already have, and have already solved.
chrisco255 wrote 16 hours 53 min ago:
It's really not, especially if you want to transact in USD and your
native currency is not USD, you regularly will pay a 5-10% or more
conversion fee.
bawolff wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is too
high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even though that
is nothing in terms of money (for most of us), the friction of
money actually being involved in and of itself probably makes it
not worth it. Especially when its just a silly internet thing.
mattdesl wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
If that was the cost of decentralization I am sure a lot of users
and especially content creators would consider it. I would rather
pay 5c per year on Twitter and own my social graph, rather than
pay 0c and leave the platform in the hands of the highest bidder.
soulofmischief wrote 19 hours 38 min ago:
I'd happily pay a subscription to a closed community if I thought
the value of the community was higher than the entry cost.
However, I'm glad Hacker News is open and democratic.
danpalmer wrote 20 hours 57 min ago:
It's not just sign up though, it's posting comments, upvoting,
etc. Every "write" becomes a transaction, many with their own
tokens.
> the friction of money actually being involved ... makes it not
worth it
This is it. There are very few people who live for this level of
financialisation.
fbrusch wrote 8 hours 28 min ago:
Farcaster is doing it (allowing posting, upvoting etc) with a
pragmatic architecture with different degrees of
decentralization (identity onchain, posts on a p2p storage Ã
la bittorrent), and it's going pretty fine...
URI [1]: https://warpcast.com/
everfree wrote 18 hours 32 min ago:
I think it's helpful to realize that most everything on the
internet is already financialized by default. Whenever you post
a comment, upvote, or "write", it costs some company somewhere
an amount of money to maintain the marginal amount of server
capacity required to process your request. And if you aren't
paying for the product, then you are the product of course
(ads).
So blockchains don't necessarily financialize things that
aren't already financialized, they just tend to make money flow
in a more direct way from a group of people using a service to
a group of people hosting/providing it. Instead of paying using
a micropayment of attention that gets monetized through a
complex and often bespoke advertising arrangement, you can pay
using a micropayment of a recognizable asset that has actual
market value.
Personally, if I could click a single Apple-pay-like button in
my browser to attach say 0.5 cents of postage to this Hacker
News comment to get it to post, I doubt I would think twice
about it. In fact, I would probably participate more
confidently knowing it's a deterrent for bots (less of a
problem for Hacker News, but a huge problem on Reddit and
Xitter).
bawolff wrote 15 hours 16 min ago:
> they just tend to make money flow in a more direct way from
a group of people using a service to a group of people
hosting/providing
I suppose there is a certain sense that transaction fees go
to people providing services to the blockchain... but i would
mostly describe it as paying rent and not actually paying the
person responsible for the service.
hanniabu wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
That's not how it works, not every interaction needs to be
onchain
sainez wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
Don't know why this is downvoted. It is possible (and
probably desirable) to build applications where only certain
data is stored on chain.
medo-bear wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
What parts of the world? In non developed countries bank fees are
actually higher than in the West.
In Bosnia a most basic bank account costs about $3 per month, or 60
Ethereum transactions (most people usually have 10 - 20 transaction
per month). For paying bills banks usually charge a commission fee
of 1%. And if you want to send money to someone 50 kms away but
across the border the fee is $20 with few days wait for money to be
received.
searchableguy wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
Most major developing countries in Asia have p2p instant payments
and bank accounts for free or with minimum balance requirement.
UPI (Indian market) launched cross border support with a couple
countries starting this year. 118 billion transactions happen via
UPI annually.
I do think there is some niche market where ethereum payments
will shine but hard to beat free and instant systems already in
place at far bigger scale.
arandomusername wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
Which is great when sending to someone in the same country, but
we live in a globalized world.
Sending between countries (except within EU) is best done using
crypto.
danpalmer wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
In many parts of the world people are basically cash-only and
don't pay fees for handling money most of the time. The
"unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to serve.
Also I'd challenge 10-20 transactions per month. I think in many
near cash-less societies it might be closer to 5 per day.
justwool wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
5 per day?
My budget is $20 dollars a day.
Lmao people are so out of touch with reality.
5 transactions a day? For what? Honestly can I get off this
train.
medo-bear wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
Bosnia and eastern and most of europe in general is certainly
not cash-less nor do most people desire that
SideburnsOfDoom wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
> The "unbanked". This is the market Ethereum wants to serve
M-Pesa got there first, and without the taint of
cryptocurrency. It's a real, deployed, working system at scale,
and has been for years. The idea that a "hope to serve" after a
bit more crypto tech innovation will open an untapped market
... well, I wouldn't take it seriously. It's wishful thinking
at both ends of the supply and demand equation.
thisgoesnowhere wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
You can't invest in M-Pesa tho so it's obviously very bad /s
kinakomochidayo wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
It'll come down even more as blobs are increased, and PeerDAS is
implemented
dylkil wrote 22 hours 36 min ago:
> which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user
Not exactly, L2s are being abstracted away, end users eventually wont
even be aware what chain they are interacting with without tracing
the tx
ASinclair wrote 17 hours 2 min ago:
If you donât know which chain youâre interacting with how can
you trust your transactions are secured by a chain at all?
sainez wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
How does this differ from e.g. online banking? Does every user
manually check encryption algorithms and keys?
pa7x1 wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
I'm going to leave here a few dashboards that might be interesting:
See Ethereum scale day by day (today Ethereum is doing 160 tps, more
than 10x its initial throughput): [1] You can now settle your
transactions on rollups for mere cents: [2] Neat dashboards regarding
blob usage: [3] What's coming... With the current number of blobs
Ethereum will likely be able to do up to ~500 tps on average. ~1000 tps
in burst mode. But in coming upgrades the blobs will be sharded through
Data Availability Sampling, allowing validators to verify only a subset
while being sure that the rest of blobs are validated and available by
the rest of the network. This will allow to scale Ethereum up to 256
blobs. Which will give Ethereum a throughput of around ~100K tps.
URI [1]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
URI [2]: https://fees-growthepie.streamlit.app/
URI [3]: https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs
pavon wrote 22 hours 5 min ago:
For context, Visa and MasterCard combined average 10k's tps, and are
capable of processing 100k's tps at peak. So if it works out, that
would put Ethereum in the same ballpark.
chrisco255 wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
Adding to this list, for getting average 24 hour costs for rollups:
[1] The "growthepie" link above wasn't working in my browser due to
"lack of WebGL support".
URI [1]: https://gasfees.io
dinobones wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
Thank-you for the helpful links. Can you share some resources to
learn about data availability sampling?
Also, have folks invented a cheap/fast way of going from L2 <-> L2
without having to do an L1 tx?
I fear that L2s may never be adopted due to network segmentation, but
if it's possible for all L2s to interchange with each other cheaply,
then it's just as good as L1 IMO.
chrisco255 wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
> have folks invented a cheap/fast way of going from L2 <-> L2
without having to do an L1 tx?
There are bridge providers like Connext ( [1] ), Hop ( [2] ),
LayerZero ( [3] ) etc that provide liquidity across L2s to make it
simple and cheap for common assets like USDC, ETH, etc.
Attempts to do this trustlessly without relying on a liquidity
provider do exist, but they're not mature enough to mention yet.
They usually rely on zk proofs to validate that an asset was
bridged from one chain to another.
L2s are presently already supporting more activity than L1, with 4
L2s regularly doing more TPS than L1. Agreed that fragmentation is
a concern, but I think we'll get there soon where the UX is
abstracted away for users and the assets flow cheaply.
URI [1]: https://www.connext.network/
URI [2]: https://portal.arbitrum.io/projects/bridges-and-on-ramps?p...
URI [3]: https://layerzero.network/
everfree wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
This post from the ethresearch forum goes over data availability
sampling (DAS) in detail. [1] To transfer assets from L2 to L2, of
course the naive implementation is to use a centralized
intermediary, of which there are currently many that are reasonably
priced. There are ways to go between zk-L2s without any central
broker in theory; Iâm not sure whether thatâs also true of
optimistic-L2s.
URI [1]: https://ethresear.ch/t/from-4844-to-danksharding-a-path-to...
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 1 day ago:
All this crpyto technology is fascinating. But is it used for anything?
I asked this in an Ask HN today, but got no answer so far: [1] It looks
like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for
anything.
If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain
projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What
could be a near term use case?
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852389
albrewer wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
If anything will get us out of this ad-ridden hellhole of the
centralized internet, I think it'll be cryptocurrency that allows
users to transfer tiny amounts of money to a site instead of an ad
platform paying the site fractions of a cent for my view.
Like if all I need to do is transfer $0.00001 to the site for my view
and it's guaranteed to be free from ads or data hoarding, sign me tf
up.
kjkjadksj wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
Once you set that up as crypto, thats it, thats the price. With the
present model ad agencies can play all sorts of games with this
price, inflating or deflating it to suit immediate business needs.
Its a whole meta that will poof into smoke. So unless the new
crypto meta captures the benefits to ad agencies the current
âestimateâ model of pricing has, it wonât see daylight.
hem777 wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
My non-techie brother has been staking his 1 ETH he bought couple of
years ago and has earned today, in his words, âslightly more than
from my insurance savings account in the past 10 yearsâ. I think
thatâs a really nice use case.
willmadden wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
We use it every day for cross-border payments.
hanniabu wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
Here's a bunch of usecases I put together a while ago
URI [1]: https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/32b0f933618a3229efe3fbc01cb...
scyclow wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
People love shitting on NFTs, but there's still a really good art
scene based on NFTs and smart contracts. And once you have digital
objects that you actually care about, all the web3 infrastructure is
surprisingly useful.
darby_eight wrote 17 hours 41 min ago:
> there's still a really good art scene based on NFTs and smart
contracts
I'm still not quite getting the idea hereâthese assets only
really "exist" in web3 apps, right?
tdudhhu wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
Yes, they can prove ownership of an art peace but can not prove
the art peace even exists.
akira2501 wrote 19 hours 9 min ago:
> there's still a really good art scene based on NFTs
Is that a "good art" scene, or a "good" art scene?
toenail wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
> But is it used for anything?
What people like you usually miss.. hodling bitcoin IS one of its
uses, store of value.
> It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology
for anything.
You haven't missed anything, that's why we say bitcoin, not
blockchain.
ForHackernews wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
> What could be a near term use case?
Ransomware, evading currency controls, funding North Korea.
valcron1000 wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
> It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology
for anything.
> If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain
projects
HN is very adverse to the blockchain space. This is not the best
place to look for people using the technology since 9/10 times you
would get downvoted to oblivion
tdudhhu wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
Some days ago ICP showed it can run ML on a blockchain.
While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real
possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from
Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.
But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop
Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
ShamelessC wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
> ML on a blockchain
I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on that.
Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would be that
that basically isn't true; either it's not actually machine
learning (as is understood today) or it isn't actually a blockchain
but rather normal distributed computing being "verified" via
blockchain somehow?
Would love to be proven wrong though.
tdudhhu wrote 20 hours 46 min ago:
[1] A YT video about this: [2] I am still very sceptical about
this because it looks very slow, but it seems to work.
URI [1]: https://internetcomputer.org/
URI [2]: https://youtu.be/wk3FxuA5DKs
dlubarov wrote 20 hours 58 min ago:
There are basically two approaches to on-chain inference:
consensus-based approaches (several parties run inference and
give a claimed result), and zkML (one party runs inference and
proves the result cryptographically).
zkML can be done using general-purpose ZK libraries (since they
support arbitrary computations), or there are some specialized
tools for proving ML inference, such as [1] . It's currently
pretty expensive to prove huge models like LLMs, but there's a
lot of work being done to make it more practical.
URI [1]: https://github.com/ddkang/zkml
throw_e5caa2819 wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
(made a throwaway for this)
I have personally used cryptocurrency (Monero) to buy small
quantities of substances for personal use from darkweb marketplaces a
while ago.
This has been a great experience, I think the system of public vendor
reputation , reviews, user discussions, independently published test
results etc. adds a significant layer of safety to this process
compared to random local 'street' type transactions of this sort.
Whether you approve of this or not, crypto is a very important layer
in this system, I feel like this is the only actual use it has
currently, although it's obviously not something crypto advocates
like to advertise.
imchillyb wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
Banks have been using the Ethereum blockchain for behind the scenes
bad debt transfers for about seven years now.
Banks donât want to deal with treasury departments nor do the banks
want to be beholden to federal governments regarding prime rates.
Ethereum allows banks to circumvent these types of issues because
rates are dictated by banks not by governments and their treasury
departments.
Crypto currency is coming soon. Itâs only a matter of time and
validating processes now.
schmichael wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
Citation needed (from a non-crypto-booster source)
lottin wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
What?
maxcoder4 wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
That sounds suspicious. Maybe a few years back out would work, but
now cryptocurrency is pretty regulated.
And at the same time it's not battle tested. Any CFO who signs of
on something like that risks shareholder fury when anything goes
wrong.
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
How can a bank transfer debt via Ethereum?
Isn't "debt" a contract between the bank and a user? How do you
transfer that and to whom?
orthecreedence wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
I think it could be used for some kind of permissioned, collectively
crowdsourced database that's (mostly) free from the control of a
single group of administrators/gatekeepers. I guess kind of like a
decentralized wiki.
In my view, blockchains shine where you need auditable global state,
bonus points if you don't want central control in your operations
(obviously this then kicks the can to the core devs). This use-case
is fairly miniscule for most applications, though.
As far as currency, I think they also have their use-cases as well
but most people don't want a global audit trail of all their
purchases. Things like Monero and Zcash shine here. The value
fluctuations are obnoxious, though.
I'm saying this as a big blockchain skeptic. I think most of the
things people use them for are silly.
coffeebeqn wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
Shared append only, very slow database. Itâs a very specific
setup but maybe thereâs some scenario for it.
everfree wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
I think a shared, "slow" database could be useful for property
deeds. Give the state admin access to override the typical
transfer process in case of theft, and then you're left with a
24/7 accessible public database of property deeds, where the
current owner and full history of a deed (transfers, liens,
easements) can be accessed and verified by any joe with a
computer.
It could be useful for professional licenses, too. Everyone could
have a verifiable history of someone's professional license -
when it was issued, when it was revoked, again mathematically
verifiable. You could be sure that someone's record was never
changed or deleted without leaving an audit trail.
Though to be fair, the important part of this is the chain of
cryptographically signed and timestamped events. It could work
without strictly being a blockchain. You could imagine something
that behaves more like a git repository with a flat file database
in it.
yieldcrv wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
a better question is to look at how people use it, the frictions they
encounter, and who works on solving those frictions
just saying âspeculationâ as if thats not a use case misses that
âfinancial servicesâ are our biggest industry on the planet and
thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions
and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies
are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny
fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution
also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to
discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a
parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write
database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or
trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the
standard impossible
mand1575 wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
Given that we are now entering another crypto hype cycle and
blockchain technology, discussions often veer towards crypto and
the allure of embedded tokens. Iâm going to stick to the realty
and opportunity: utilizing blockchain in fixed income finance.
Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall
Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income
market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the
origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges in
reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night cycles,
calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling DTCC to settle
trades. Blockchain is the best technology to solve this. Only if
applied correctly. Otherwise, itâs a waste.
We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and
misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities space.
Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we have now
proved to regulators that securities originated on blockchain are
indeed securities â not merely speculative digital assets.
At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of friction
in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data
quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned
network, we have proved by recording of municipal loans and
securities on our blockchain. While it may not be the flashy
product that garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant
step forward. We also trained all of FINRAâs fixed income
examinersâ¦.
Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the investors,
giving them access to negotiate with the issuers. From there the
goal is to extend to real-time clearing and settlement,
streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the fixed
income ecosystem.
Here's how a trade moves through our system in current
stateâ¦itâs a mental journey.
URI [1]: https://www.chicagofed.org/markets/view-lasalle-street/us-...
hdusa952 wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
Could the brokered CDs be a retail purchase?
yieldcrv wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
Great, yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain
to just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Capital formation has been occurring this way for at least 12
years on public blockchains.
Satoshidice was one of the first companies and its shareholders
created a vibrant secondary market onchain. They did dividends
daily and it always went out to every shareholder daily. What
happens now is so much more advanced but even more frictionless
for crypto native issuers and traders.
One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their
redundant processes so that registered securities can do the
same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
mand1575 wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
>yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain to
just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Perhaps for clearing - ownership wise I think it stays
permissioned - no investor wants to loose the wallet and not be
able to recover their asset.
>One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their
redundant processes so that registered securities can do the
same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
100% - that's the plan but it's a massive regulatory capture to
fight. Akin to launching a rocket and you need DoD and hundred
other permissions.
One thing to keep in mind - Sec Act of 1933 and 1934 are here
to stay - they may get new regs under them but ownership needs
to be transferable outside just the normal case of trading i.e.
trust, death, divorce, birth blah blah...
pa7x1 wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
In case you are curious BlackRock launched last week a money
market fund on Ethereum. You can see it onchain here: [1] And
here the press release:
URI [1]: https://etherscan.io/token/0x7712c34205737192402172409a8...
URI [2]: https://securitize.io/learn/press/blackrock-launches-fir...
mand1575 wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
Aware - and kudos to them for using Ethereum - It's a word play
to confuse the market. Notice they don't say on Public Net. The
installation is permissioned. I was involved with the first
Yankee CD trade in 2018 with JPM. No investor can buy this
without the KYC/AML checks, means if there's a wallet it's just
a brokerage account - the underlying security is at a custodian
not on-chain and the TA is still involved in registering the
ownership of the share.
troupo wrote 19 hours 13 min ago:
> the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of
direct origination and data quality across market participants.
By leveraging a permissioned network,
Blockchain has nothing to do with "data quality across market
participants". Bad data entered into blockchain remains bad data.
mand1575 wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
hence origination - bad data can be fixed. try calling 30
different vendors and rely on downloading the file to run the
M2M night-cycle
troupo wrote 53 min ago:
Basically, you're lacking a platform that brings all those
things together.
What blockchains may give you is a slow append-only log,
which is a very minor part of that platform. And making
everyone move to that platform is a much bigger challenge :)
FactKnower69 wrote 23 hours 13 min ago:
>just saying âspeculationâ as if thats not a use case misses
that âfinancial servicesâ are our biggest industry on the
planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space
This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial services"
are both a massive waste of labor that produces zero material
wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money laundering and further
upward siphoning of wealth.
This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that those
big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their labor to
actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake money back and
forth between different buckets until more money appears out of
thin air:
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-war...
hot_gril wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
Its main purpose is internet currency. The only serious uses surround
that via smart contracts, like decentralized exchanges or provably
fair gambling (unsavory as that is). Any time someone says "the
currency aspect is separate from blockchain," I'd be wary, seeing how
the entire point of blockchain is decentralization via proof of work
or stake.
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the
already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is,
but they never really got traction, and again that's related to
currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like
corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in
theory.
root_axis wrote 21 hours 26 min ago:
NFTs make absolutely no sense for video games collectables. As it
is, video game collectables work just fine, NFTs add nothing except
cost and complexity.
hot_gril wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
If you want there to be a marketplace for your collectibles, NFTs
are the most open way of doing that, and a lot is prebuilt.
MichaelZuo wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
Counter-strike had a market for collectibles well before?
hot_gril wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
It took work by a large parent company. And I don't know how
third-party websites can trade those, but it must mean either
Valve is managing an API or people are doing something hacky
to work around that.
troupo wrote 19 hours 21 min ago:
And the reason for that is simple: game collectibles
literally cannot work in any game on any platform except
the one they were designed for.
There's a reason you can't bring your Fortnite skin into a
Lord of the Rings game, and it has very little to do with
"central companies" and "APIs"
hot_gril wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
Interop with other games isn't the issue here.
MichaelZuo wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
So then what is the issue?
hot_gril wrote 18 hours 39 min ago:
It's what I said above, it's a lot of work for a new
game to create/maintain its own collectibles
marketplace that people can trust, and even a
well-established game like Counterstrike doesn't
properly support third-party trades. Ethereum
provides all that out of the box with NFTs.
There's also the issue that Valve controls all the
assets, but that's mostly a moot point because they
control the game anyway. I guess someone could honor
NFT skins in a separate game if they really wanted,
but that's getting theoretical.
lern_too_spel wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
That's what SAAS is for. Cheaper and easier than
building NFTs on a blockchain and integrating them
into your game.
valzam wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
They can't. There are third party websites but there is no
way for them to initiate trades. They work around this
bysome crazy peer-to-peer trust-me-bro scheme.
hot_gril wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
That's what I was expecting.
dinobones wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of
value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high,
and making any payment is extremely high friction.
shuntress wrote 19 hours 32 min ago:
This is something that feels pretty lost in most modern crypto
discussion.
It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin
whitepaper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow
online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without
going through a
financial institution"
If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a
quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.
hot_gril wrote 19 hours 5 min ago:
I think the part about not going through a financial
institution is brought up pretty often, but that line doesn't
mention the payment being especially small or quick.
brazzy wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like
$0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet
changes forever.
It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are
high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and
reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much,
much higher than $0.001.
There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they
have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment
already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than
current CC fees.
Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably
send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it
some other way, usually via ads.
Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated
transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them,
and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost,
see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage
in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well
can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.
lottin wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
Why would the internet change forever when people can reliably
send $0.001 with no fees?
giantrobot wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
Then it could be way shittier because every GET request will be
monetized. Also your whole browsing history will be public if
you're ever tied to a wallet address.
lawn wrote 21 hours 50 min ago:
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like
$0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet
changes forever.
Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and
with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its
inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
dgellow wrote 22 hours 24 min ago:
In Europe sending money from one bank account to another is
generally free and often almost instant
IncreasePosts wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
Are you talking about SCT Inst? It seems like there are no fees
built into the protocol itself, but your bank can still charge
you to use the service, and it seems many banks charge between
1 and 7 euros:
(pdf reference)
URI [1]: https://www.beuc.eu/sites/default/files/publications/b...
dgellow wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
I didnât mean a specific protocol, just based on my
experience. But where do you see 7⬠in this document? I see
lot of banks offering zero or below 1⬠fees. The highest I
see is Novo Banco at 5.20⬠(page 18).
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
Thats news to me. Can you link to a page of a bank in Europe
where they state that they offer free instant money transfers?
troupo wrote 19 hours 23 min ago:
Besides SEPA which mandated the upper ceiling and an upcoming
regulation which forbids banks from de-prioritising payments
to/from other banks (can't remember what it's called now)
many European countries have had instant bank transfers
locally. For example, Swish in Sweden:
URI [1]: https://www.swish.nu/about-swish
IanCal wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
The UK has "faster payments" which is usually instant
(sometimes held up for fraud checks). I'm not aware of any
bank that charges for this.
dgellow wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
Itâs pretty simple to see. First result I found: [1] For
example from Germany to Austria, sending 1200â¬, I see
multiple providers with no fees for quick transfers.
URI [1]: https://moneytransfers.com/bank-transfers/sepa-trans...
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
I dont't see instant transfers on that page. It says
"within 24 hours" and sometimes even "within a week".
dgellow wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
You can change filtersâ¦
You can also check
URI [1]: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/news-insi...
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
Even if you can send $1.
Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk.
Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the
other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from
you.
If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be
100x lower.
Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001
per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a
one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business
model.
troupo wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
> Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security
risk.
I wonder how small independent sites like Amazon and eBay exist
then if people dislike paying on the web because of the
security risk.
The reality is that people have literally no problem paying for
stuff on the internet.
cesarb wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
> If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be
100x lower.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a
QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR
code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms
it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites.
What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards,
it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
What if they had $50 stored in a browser plugin and when a
website asks for it, they could pay $1 with a simple click?
brazzy wrote 19 hours 22 min ago:
That was possible 30 years ago. There have been probably
been a dozen schemes that tried something like that over
the decades, starting with DigiCash from before the WWW
existed.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of
security concerns, but because even having to think about
whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a
mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with
how cheap or how easy.
hot_gril wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
There are traditional ways to send money without giving out a
secret, like Apple Pay. But there's plenty of fraud in the
other direction, people accepting charges with stolen payment
info that end up being reversed. It's always a little the
merchant's job to decide whose "money is no good here," and
that's because of laws.
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
Paying via Apple Pay means you have to pay Apple so that
Apple will pay the vendor for you.
How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
hot_gril wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
I think Apple has some special relationship with banks, so
it's not this simple. But yeah, one way or another you're
trusting Apple Pay, which presumably is more trustworthy
than a gas station sale terminal.
And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still have
to trust your computing device and the bank.
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
With crypto, you would not have to trust your computing
device nor your bank.
You would send $100 to your computing device every now
and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the
device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100
and stay away from the brand that made the device.
A bank would not be involved at all.
hot_gril wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
But you're sending that $100 from another computing
device, and if you're not trusting a bank-like entity
to hold the cryptocurrency for you, you're responsible
for securing all your money on that device without
locking yourself out.
On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is
nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz
they felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling
them to fix it.
vernon99 wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
Having a couple hardware wallets in different places
+ a paper backup split in a couple pieces gives you
enough redundancy not to worry about this. Source: my
own experience of close to 10 years now.
MadnessASAP wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
Unfortunately I will never be willing to entrust my
financial safety solely to an algorithm.
An algorithm cannot be reasoned with, it cannot
understand that your house burned down and
destroyed your ID. It cannot accept liability for
it's actions.
If I lose my bank card I go to a branch, verify my
ID, and get a replacement. The bank is liable if
they allow somebody other then me access to my
accounts, regardless of how convincing the
fraudster might have been.
Source, been using banks for 30 years now.
DennisP wrote 17 hours 1 min ago:
Key redundancy and social recovery are pretty
much solved problems in crypto.
dewey wrote 9 hours 33 min ago:
On a technical level, not a human level.
hot_gril wrote 20 hours 31 min ago:
So where do you store the paper?
lxgr wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
No, that's not how it works at all. Apple is neither in the
authorization nor the transaction clearing/settlement flow.
> How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens
isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you
could send a signed message to your bank instructing them
to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them;
again, Apple Pay is not that).
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
Are you using it as internet currency?
I don't know anyone who paid anything with it in the last 12
months.
vernon99 wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
Iâve been paying multiple people and teams remotely via btc in
the past years. Even if you can send a wire, sometimes it can be
cheaper/easier to send crypto. But in many cases itâs not even
possible to send large amounts of money without incurring massive
fees (international paypal, western union, etc). Moved hundeds of
thousands of dollars this way by now for purely legal economical
reasons, helping a bunch of people make money they would not make
otherwise.
Edit: relatedly, not everybody wants to pay their local taxes
(and who am I to judge people in various life situations?). This
itself is a _massive_ saver for the folks. Send somebody $5k usd
a couple times and their bank will start asking complicated
questions.
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
And how do you put the crypto payments into your tax reports?
bawolff wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
Seems pretty easy. My country's tax forms dont distinguish
between how you got paid, just that you got paid. Gov doesn't
care if it was through a bank, in gold bars, bitcoin, etc
(capital gains they care more about of course)
maxcoder4 wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
I use it everywhere where it's an option (so not very often,
let's say once a month). I also only use privacy services (vpn
for example) where you can pay using cryptocurrency, otherwise
what's the point
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
What are some other examples, except for a VPN where you use
crypto to pay?
And how is the situation around the world - are retailers who
offer digital goods/services allowed to accept crypto as
payments?
teh_infallible wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
There was a sketchy looking file sharing website where
someone had posted some incredibly hard to find audio tracks
that I really wanted, but the website required a
subscription. Paying with a cc meant automatically-recurring
payments, but I paid with bitcoin, got my files, and knew the
website couldnât get any money from me after that.
vernon99 wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
In most of the places itâs trivial to exchange crypto for
local currency in p2p fashion, often for cash.
hot_gril wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
There are hardly any retailers accepting it in the US. Wonder
how it is in El Salvador, since they made BTC legal tender.
doublepg23 wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
Iâm using the Bitcoin Lightning Network to support podcasts
every week or so.
URI [1]: https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/boost/
ArtTimeInvestor wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
Interesting.
Reading through the page, that sounds super complicated though.
Couldn't the podcasts simply put a lightning invoice (Which is
just a string of text I guess?) on their website with a text
like "Support us via Lightning: 1f73ac220b9..."?
lawn wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
With a regular cryptocurrency they could just post an address
or QR code and anyone can send it using a wallet at any time
(no need for them to be online or anything).
hot_gril wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
Yes
pcthrowaway wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
Wouldn't any company using blockchain technology be a blockchain
project?
hot_gril wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
Most of those are scams.
stnmtn wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
Sure, but if every blockchain project is just "building something
for the blockchain" then where is the actual value?
pcthrowaway wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
You seem to be drawing a distinction here between companies that
are building something for blockchain vs building something for
people.
Alright, I'll bite, here are some projects that use blockchain
for things besides trading tokens or improving blockchain
technology:
- [1] - [2] - [3] There's many more. Many don't have a lot of
adoption, and I don't know if they will. But at the very least
it's often interesting to see how traditional systems are
reimagined in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer
programs (with humans interacting at the perimeter) to fulfill
roles which would traditionally be filled by centralized, trusted
intermediaries (often humans).
If for no other reason than getting a front seat as many of them
fall apart spectacularly but also because it's intellectually
fascinating to see problems approached in an inverted manner.
URI [1]: https://sarcophagus.io/
URI [2]: https://www.gitcoin.co/
URI [3]: https://docs.kleros.io/
troupo wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
> But at the very least it's often interesting to see how
traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable
decentralized, trustless, computer programs
They are not re-imagined. It's a combination of a still
on-ongoing gold rush (well, the end tail of it) and people
pretending there are purely technical solutions to all
problems.
Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining"
projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems are
the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of those.
pcthrowaway wrote 9 hours 9 min ago:
> well, the end tail of it
Whatever your feelings on the impact of the technology are,
you can't possibly know this
> Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining"
projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems
are the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of
those.
I pretty much agree with this, though I'd suggest "most"
rather than "almost every".
Most scientific studies may fail to support their hypothesis
also, that doesn't make them uninteresting.
troupo wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
> I pretty much agree with this, though I'd suggest "most"
rather than "almost every".
The absolute vast majority (outside of scams, obviously).
> Most scientific studies may fail to support their
hypothesis also, that doesn't make them uninteresting.
Scientific studies don't pretend to be re-imagining
anything.
wredcoll wrote 1 day ago:
Literally no. No one is using it and no one has come up with a use.
kinakomochidayo wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
That's odd, Blackrock just created the BUIDL tokenized fund on
Ethereum. Seems like there's definitely a use for it.
URI [1]: https://securitize.io/learn/press/blackrock-launches-first...
skybrian wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm wondering how this compares with other cryptocurrencies that seem
to be getting some attention, like Solana?
everfree wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
Solana does not have blobs. Itâs really as simple as that.
skybrian wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
It seems to have low-cost transactions. Isnât that what the blobs
are for? (Among other things.)
(Sincere question; I donât follow cryptocurrencies very closely.)
everfree wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
Because transaction fees on blockchains run as an auction market,
low-cost transactions are enabled by high transaction throughput,
at least relative to demand. In other words, any chain that has
high throughput and/or low demand will have low-cost
transactions. Solana and Ethereum attempt to achieve high
throughput in very different ways.
Ethereum blobs create transaction space that has a 0-of-n trust
model (for zk-roll-ups) or a 1-of-n trust model (for optimistic
roll-ups). This means that there needs to be either zero or one
honest participant who carefully receives, processes and
validates every single roll-up transaction in order for an
outsider to be able to prove that the chain was not tampered
with.
In contrast, Solana achieves throughput by taking the classic
blockchain structure (with its n-of-n trust model) and cranking
the parameters up to 11. Basically they said "be a standard
blockchain, but do everything a hundred times faster on expensive
servers with beefy CPUs and datacenter connections". The
advantages are that it took less development time and there are
less moving parts in the stack. The disadvantage is that the
Solana blockchain is not actually verifiable, in the sense that
you or I could download a piece of software onto our home
computer and follow along with the chain to make sure it's valid.
Ethereum is verifiable in this way, even down through all of its
(properly-designed and fully implemented) L2s.
To distill the entire situation: In order to scale, Solana gives
up some of the fundamental properties that make blockchains
powerful. Ethereum, scaling with blobs, retains these fundamental
blockchain properties.
killthebuddha wrote 1 day ago:
I think it would be useful if the full domain (vitalik.eth.limo) was
displayed.
Not sure if that's possible or if it violates any HN policies about how
links are displayed, apologies if it's a silly/useless suggestion.
Edit: Not sure how popularis eth.limo w.r.t. to HN submissions, but the
full domain should probably be displayed for any eth.limo submission.
dang wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
Ok!
hanniabu wrote 1 day ago:
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools
we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously
cypherpunk and user-friendly.
Really looking forward to the next couple years. Everyone has been
writing this off as "no killer apps after 10 years" but there's a lot
that's been happening to support adoption, from scaling to improved UX.
In the next couple years those should percolate to production apps.
The primary improvements have been rollups, blobs, account abstraction,
and chain abstraction.
An example of a new onboarding process being developed by coinbase can
be seen here:
URI [1]: https://twitter.com/WilsonCusack/status/1764355750149710190
bigyikes wrote 1 day ago:
What value proposition does crypto offer that existing solutions do
not?
The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is
âdecentralizationâ and the lack of trust required.
The problem is, most people are perfectly fine trusting their
financial institutions.
Another commenter was downvoted for saying âNo one caresâ, but a
more precise way of putting this is âthe average person doesnât
care about decentralizationâ and this is spot on.
Itâs cool tech, but it reminds me a bit of math research - towers
of abstractions built over decades, with little effect on the real
world. We can only hope that some benefits will be uncovered down the
line.
Thatâs what blockchain technology is: interesting research which
will never be popular with or relevant to a lay person (outside of
speculative bubbles)
mattdesl wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
Lots of that advanced math research finds its way into practical
engineering (cryptography, digital media, compression, physics, AI,
and so on). The average layperson does not care about mathematics,
period.
You may see a similar situation one day: some application might
move to settle their economic value on Eth L2 rather than Stripe,
eg for more control or lower fees. To the average layperson, they
wouldnât know/care about how the app works under the hood.
fsflover wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
> The problem is, most people are perfectly fine trusting their
financial institutions.
Most people also don't need free speech, because they have nothing
to say.
lottin wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
Exactly. I mean, you don't even have to trust financial
institutions. You only have to trust the institutions that are in
charge of maintaining law and order. Everything else follows from
that. And if you can't trust those, then you have bigger problems
that cannot be fixed with some damn cryptocurrency.
valcron1000 wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
> The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is
âdecentralizationâ and the lack of trust required.
That a very big "only". For me that's the killer app. I do not
trust financial institutions and the ones that I trust do not want
to accept me as their customer.
> âthe average person doesnât care about decentralizationâ
It's like saying "the average person does not care about a system
of interconnected computer networks that communicates through
TCP/IP". The average person cares about watching reels on Instagram
or sending messages through WhatsApp.
> Thatâs what blockchain technology is: interesting research
which will never be popular
I have no doubt that someone said the same regarding the Internet.
drak0n1c wrote 23 hours 13 min ago:
Decentralization of compute is perhaps a more compelling story.
There have been many recent complaints of massive digital networks
being at the whim of centralized IP and platform owners making
unpopular decisions - whether in social media or games. Even
non-profit and volunteer projects collapse when leaders abandon
ship or become tyrants. What if open source code could also be
extended to open decentralized hosting via micropayments - the
direction of which all decided by users in a participatory format -
whether via representative republic, direct democracy, or elected
dictator?
The obstacle is human nature and ease-of-use friction - taking
responsibility for maintenance and innovation and imposing a
participatory need requires a modicum of awareness and willingness
to contribute - even if only with pennies. This is annoying and
wasteful red tape for most, and so corporations with strong
advertisers and investors who can provide it cheaper or for free
are obviously seen as the better choice. Co-ops and communes have
this problem.
pa7x1 wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and
self-custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's
ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows immediately
that you see value in cryptocurrency.
Because you cannot use cash to transact globally, and you cannot
use digital forms of central bank issued currency permissionlessly
or have self-custody. Cryptocurrency gives you all those three
properties.
So you must give up something. HNers typically are willing to give
up the permissionless and self-custody properties. After all, most
of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where
personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected.
But at a minimum you should consider that, not all the world lives
under those circumstances. And that there are no guarantees that
those circumstances will always be preserved in your cozy first
world country. Certainly if you are willing to give them up so
easily.
Don't be so quick to assume it cannot happen where you live. One
day they may go after some fringe truckers protesting in Canada.
Another day they may go after some camgirls earning a living in
ways that some executive board of a payment processor considers
reprobable. Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or
cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
troupo wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
> If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and
self-custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's
ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows immediately
that you see value in cryptocurrency.
Those two separate sentences do not immediately team up to
somehow lead to the third sentence.
> After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic
countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental
pillars and protected.
As do most crypto proponents who imagine the world outside the
"enlightened West" as barbaric lawless lands governed by roaming
bands Mad Max-style.
Even though than we can take a popular online service that people
pay for and see in which countries it's available. For example,
Spotify says it's available in 238 countries and territories: [1]
. It does not accept any form of crypto currency as payment. This
means that people in these countries have enough financial
institutions and methods, and enough security to be able to pay
for an international music streaming service [1].
> Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot
spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
Or some day the Mad Max-style roaming gang will break down your
door and steal all your cash. Or break all your fingers until you
give them access to all your wallets. [1] The number of ways
people pay in various countries is staggering. See e.g. what
Adyen (the payment integrator that companies like Spotify, Uber,
eBay etc. use) has integrated with: [2] and [3] and [4] The
complete willful ignorance and obliviousness that the absolute
various majority of crypto proponents exhibit is no less
staggering.
URI [1]: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/where-spotify-is-...
URI [2]: https://docs.adyen.com/payment-methods/
URI [3]: https://docs.adyen.com/unified-commerce/pay-by-link/supp...
URI [4]: https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/what-we-support/pay...
jncfhnb wrote 1 day ago:
Like what
pa7x1 wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://github.com/daimo-eth/daimo
fwip wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
The killer app of crypto is... a wallet app to put your crypto
in. Okay.
erulabs wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
This is âdecentralized Venmoâ.
Yes, the âkiller appâ of internet currency is going to be
money transfers. That is not surprising, non-trivial, and quite
valuable.
lottin wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
That's not a killer app. We already have money transfers.
pa7x1 wrote 21 hours 3 min ago:
Providing global instant settlement for sub-cent fees?
Doubt it.
jncfhnb wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
Then you believe people will use this at a scale worthy
of being called a killer app?
jncfhnb wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
So⦠a place to store your funds that is irretrievably lost if
you lose your phone?
pa7x1 wrote 23 hours 50 min ago:
You can backup your account with passkeys.
jncfhnb wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
Surely everyone will do that
hanniabu wrote 1 day ago:
Pleasantly surprised to find this here, especially without all the
"tokens are a scam" comments
wesselbindt wrote 1 day ago:
I'm with you, they feel a bit redundant and uninteresting at this
point. Like we get it, a spade's a spade, no reason to go on about
it. Imagine people commented "postgres is a database" on every
postgres related post.
k8svet wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
You know, from the way crypto threads are moderated, I bet I can
guess dang's opinion about them. Just ridiculously vapid content.
hot_gril wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
It's funny how many times in my career I've heard someone say "____
is not a database, it's a datastore" referring to something they
made that's basically Postgres with extra steps.
orthecreedence wrote 1 day ago:
I'm so out of the loop these days...I've written off blockchain junk
almost entirely. Can someone break down what blobs are? Is this some
kind of temporary place for transactions to go so they aren't charged
fees individually?
EDIT: NVM, I RTFMed [1] . I wonder what the trade-offs of layer 2
protocols are. Less secure?
URI [1]: https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/
pyaamb wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
a good explainer video
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9PHWloIiU
ForHackernews wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
Layer 2: It turns out "blockchain technology" works a lot better if
you do all the important stuff off-chain.
I predict that by 2030 the cryptocurrency nerds will have discovered
SQL and transaction audits.
chrisco255 wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
Right now at least, layer 2s are somewhat immature. Many of them do
host billions in assets, but they each have different tech stacks
backing them up that are at varying levels of maturity and
decentralization. L2Beat does a great job of breaking down the L2
ecosystem: [1] Note the pie chart in the row for each L2. That pie
chart notes the security risks for each one based on their tech
stack. Ideally, the top L2s should strive to reach "Stage 2" which
could be considered as secure as L1 itself, but no general purpose L2
is at that stage yet and most are still at Stage 0.
URI [1]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
benreesman wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like âblockchain
junkâ Iâll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second
female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the
first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did
in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH
Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and
was the doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case
of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the
rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known
colloquially as âpBFTâ) which is the consensus mechanism used in
a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not most of
which have at least peripheral connections to what people typically
mean when throwing around the term blockchain. I havenât followed
her career closely over the last few years, but long into the BitCoin
era she was leading a group at MIT studying exactly this set of
topics.
Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized,
decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now
or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and
novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming
and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop
with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put
all the plaques.
So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the
âjunkâ stuff.
If you want to say: â2017-era ICO exit scam junkâ, or âpump-and
dump altcoin junk circa 2022â, be my guest as long as you cite
examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like
there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad
(whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they
are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldnât be
prosecuted).
But even there, Iâll remind you that the conventional financial
system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the
attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority
suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone
prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever weâre calling
this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25
years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and
if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth.
Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia.
To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the
one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is
investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the
victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I
have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure heâs
getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and
weâre frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting
financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so heâs not
sure how much yet).
Maybe Iâm missing something here, my financial credentials are
modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why
the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the
best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world
is deficient?
hot_gril wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
"the consensus mechanism used in," where "used in" is the key part.
Not "developed for."
benreesman wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
Hence my explicitly noting that Dr. Liskov continued this
research and grew it in scope long after it had become clear that
one of if not the primary application was clearly going to be
tamper-resistant ledgers of financial transactions.
Itâs also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as
someone who even more explicitly did extremely sophisticated
research well-received by the academic community unambiguously in
this context.
I just do not understand what it is about this topic that turns a
normally very thoughtful community of people with a generally
very high regard for the research agendas of noted computer
scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk critics on a dime.
You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil down to
some version of âblockchain is for cryptocurrency,
cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud has no
place in our societyâ.
But every link in that chain is either incorrect or selectively
tolerant of wrongdoing.
Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of finance.
âEveryone knows I mean crypto.â
Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to them, some
positive, some negative.
âIâm talking about the fraud which is rampant and the
main/only use case.â
Eh, not really, speculation isnât by itself fraud, although it
is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with a high
ratio of speculation to other non-speculative activities
generally have more fraud in them, so more or less rampant than
conventional digital finance?
âMore both relatively and absolutely.â
No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you have no
fucking clue how much fraud happens either relatively or
absolutely in conventional financial markets. Furthermore, the
fraud that does happen is dramatically more likely to be
investigated and prosecuted, and the victims of that fraud are
dramatically more likely to be recognized as victims (unlike for
example victims of predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their
homes and got called criminals into the bargainâ.
I donât want to believe that itâs just the banal fact that we
all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in crypto
markets and we didnât (Iâve never speculated in crypto
markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I went into
debt when the tech job market collapsed last year, with uh, a
little help).
But Iâm really struggling here to find a more charitable
conclusion.
hot_gril wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
I'm not against cryptocurrency at all, but you're saying that
Dr. Liskov was researching algorithms for that purpose when she
really wasn't. Byzantine fault tolerance has lots of other
applications, in fact if you search "currency" in the paper she
worked on, you'll only find a single match: "concurrency."
URI [1]: https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf
benreesman wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
I didnât say Dr. Liskov was doing pBFT research for the
express purpose of promoting cryptocurrency as an
application, I said Professor Liskov was working on
âblockchain techâ, itâs therefore pretty cheeky to call
âblockchainâ âjunkâ, and I said that she not only
persisted in but increased the scope of such research during
a period of time when it was impossible not to know this is
how the technology is being adopted.
If youâre going to nitpick in an effort to discredit a
robust argument by beam-searching for the weakest-looking
link in the argument and go directly after it, then at a
minimum, be right.
Donât refute intentional misquotations.
hot_gril wrote 19 hours 36 min ago:
Ok, you said Professor Liskov was working on blockchain
tech. Is that the point? Because no, she wasn't.
benreesman wrote 19 hours 10 min ago:
Weâve reached my limit on the nesting of a contentious
sub-thread (frankly Iâm surprised we havenât reached
HNâs limit on such).
If Iâm mistaken about this, I want to be educated about
it, I hold all of the famous computer scientists Iâve
mentioned in extremely high regard and if Iâve been
inadvertently spreading falsehoods itâs a priority to
me to both stop doing that and depending on the degree of
such an error if it is one, a formal apology could even
be in order.
I do not think that this remains a useful or even
acceptable forum for that conversation however.
If you know or strongly believe that Iâve made
statements about public figures that I admire and that
are inaccurate, Iâd not only invite but explicitly
request that you contact me directly to straighten it out
without the distractions and perverse incentives of an
audience to a debate that has become more than
âspiritedâ.
Iâm reachable at b7r6@b7r6.net and I hope to continue
this discussion in a more productive forum than this
particular sub-thread.
ongy wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen.
Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed
(High Availibility) scenarios.
There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain
in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains
specifically.
Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to
see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famous
person under that name I can find is a historian, not an expert in
computing related topics.
There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on (remember,
git storage is a blockchain) but the value proposition of crypo
currency blockchains (largely 0 trust) have so far not materialized
outside speculative currency.
Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the developers of
e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the party that would have
to enable something do not have an incentive to give up controle.
benreesman wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb:
the gentlemanâs name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE ( [1] ), I
also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that
includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS
and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment:
heâs got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers.
His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially
around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus,
the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System
F implementation in the Agda proof system.
I donât think itâs called an appeal to authority when the
topic is the merit of a field of study (Iâve never heard it
referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming
consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific
honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in
any field) are attached to research done over decades and
reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus,
thatâs an argument that the study was important, novel,
rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the
entire reputable academic and scientific world because thatâs
how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a
researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again
do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this
research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to
parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a
better citation than my own opinion.
I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly
Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and
many other tools many of us use daily.
The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the
digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things
like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize /
WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and
faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved,
and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO
system in US equities trading to name one example, the
consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to
be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines,
before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and
before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of
these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions
of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the
ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation,
inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit
active and reasonably efficient markets.
Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in
a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce
and much more but still comparatively small amounts of
speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not
cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big
leagues in terms of notional value: right now theyâre somewhere
in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe
mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both
a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at
something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just
really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all
derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of
trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly.
But I wasnât making the case that this stuff is like 100%
locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that
itâs dismissive and ignorant to call it âjunkâ and that
what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are
tightly clustered in this area.
Itâs well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination
of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in
that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is
problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive
to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things
are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with
more noble motives than others, but thatâs finance: if youâre
under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant
battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and
people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse
yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance
and Iâll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence
of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but
really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital
equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler
orthecreedence wrote 21 hours 8 min ago:
> I agree that git is a blockchain
Wait, isn't git more of a merkle-DAG? I thought one of the
defining features of blockchains was effectively branchless
global state. My understanding is that DAGs are a superset of
blockchains. Is this a wrong?
My comment about "blockchain junk" is mainly in response to the
fact that it's nearly impossible to find any
investment/involvement in the space without running into
complete fraudsters and starry-eyed "entrepreneurs" who view
blockchain as some sort of god technology that will lift us out
of poverty and/or upend the corporate control mechanisms. AKA a
bandaid fix by people who don't understand its actual
limitations or the dynamics of the systems they supposedly
oppose.
As a system for maintaining auditable global state/knowledge in
the face of sybil attacks, yes, it's impressive. However 99% of
the projects people reach for it do not require it, hence the
term "junk." It's more a condemnation of the space surrounding
the technology than the technology itself. I figured that would
be somewhat obvious.
benreesman wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I
regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or
disrespectful to you personally. I maintain itâs an
unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but Iâm in no
position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say
unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
There isnât really a robust consensus that Iâm aware of
as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists
git as one, and I suppose thatâs as good a source as any
absent such consensus.
git is an (often if not typically in practice degenerate)
Merkle Tree, the contents of one atomic (and sometimes de
facto immutable) node contain a hash (O(1)-verifiably
k-equivalent⦠you know the drill) of ancestors.
In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a
blockchain loosely as a âtamper-resistant, directed, and
typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an
implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but
critically important fully-verifiable history subject to
heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on
branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded
susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable
consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some
semi-predicable cadenceâ, which is pretty hand-wavy but I
think captures the spirit of the general usage. By that
definition git is only a blockchain by common convention,
thereâs nothing preventing or even discouraging arbitrary,
unbounded branching other than it doesnât have a ton of
widely valued use cases: most any time youâre fine with a
branch that never has any scope to interact with any other
via rebase or merge you could just make a copy or maybe a
copy and a copy of some metadata/history, though git in
practical terms is a good tool for such a copy.
And I think youâre right that as with any over-hyped
technology, it gets attached to projects that donât need it
when itâs âhotâ, preoccupies both investors and
entrepreneurs without better ideas for how to deploy their
time and money when itâs âinâ, and is therefore
constantly oscillating between being a magnet for snake-oil
types and being out in the cold.
Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption thatâs maybe
net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a
financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically
has to be renewable but itâs kinda too soon to tell, and I
think Iâm now having trouble seeing how crypto three years
ago and âAIâ last year are any different along these
dimensions.
The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher
variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some
dumbass âpaperclip-indifferent AGIâ tripe.
Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create
transparency into financial markets and compel governments to
open the books on what is and isnât legal regarding money,
for who, and why. It will never like, totally disintermediate
government from money, because money is the #1 national
security priority of any functioning government, so inventing
money that the government canât control is more likely to
buy you a R9x than a Turing Award (in a macabre way itâs
darkly amusing to contemplate the fact that it could buy you
both). It also has a positive (in my view) externality of
creating broad-spectrum incentives for the public to
understand a little better how important digital identity,
security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024 and build at
least a little muscle memory around running a slightly or
maybe even substantially tighter ship on personal digital
footprint. Iâve apologized to two friends this week because
I lied to them about something that is now news that recently
broke on the Onavo/Meta thing TechCrunch ran and I wanted
them to hear it from me. I lied about this because before it
hit the press, I felt it would have been detrimental to the
national security of the United States to talk about it, but
what I really wish is that we wouldnât end up in situations
where anyone faces such dilemmas in private industry.
AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer
level (though itâs largely a solution to itself as a way to
get information one could previously get from a search engine
before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making
arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, weâve
had spam for a long time, but spam so good itâs convincing
to experts in anything other than a bad mood? Thatâs new.).
The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other
than âavailable weightâ and âoperator-alignedâ, i.e.
whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable
power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from
being accessed by anyone else.
So probably higher stakes.
orthecreedence wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
> You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I
regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or
disrespectful to you personally. I maintain itâs an
unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but Iâm in no
position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say
unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
I didn't take offense at all. I find your knowledge of the
space refreshing. I have watched blockchains carefully from
the sidelines for some time because of my interest in the
intersection of economics, state, and technology and how
blockchains might change those things. Over time I became
more jaded because the scaling problems blockchains run
into seem to be almost insurmountable, so my interest has
pivoted into less-global, more-scalable approaches (like
merkle-DAG CRDTs with some external form of validation).
> There isnât really a robust consensus that Iâm aware
of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia
lists git as one, and I suppose thatâs as good a source
as any absent such consensus.
Fair enough.
> In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a
blockchain loosely as a âtamper-resistant, directed, and
typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an
implied machine economics optimization around infrequent
but critically important fully-verifiable history subject
to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds
on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a
bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a
verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of
branching on some semi-predicable cadenceâ, which is
pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the
general usage.
Have you considered a career in poetry?? Joking aside, this
pretty much sums up my view as well. A DAG with a strong
gravitational pull towards a master branch with somewhat
infrequently changing data. Which also includes git, so
you're right.
> Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption thatâs
maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net
attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap
that it basically has to be renewable but itâs kinda too
soon to tell, and I think Iâm now having trouble seeing
how crypto three years ago and âAIâ last year are any
different along these dimensions.
Yes, agreed. Let's spin up an immense amount of computing
power to train a model that hallucinates when asked basic
questions. Again, there is a space where the marriage of a
large dataset of knowledge and an automated linguistic
system searching that knowledge has great use-cases, but
throwing "AI" at every problem is just another eye-rolley
fad.
> The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher
variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of
some dumbass âpaperclip-indifferent AGIâ tripe.
What do you mean by this?
> Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create
transparency into financial markets and compel governments
to open the books on what is and isnât legal regarding
money, for who, and why.
This is one of the things I was originally most excited
about. Make politicians receive all wages, contributions,
etc through some auditable public currency. If you're going
to work in the public sector, then you have to consent to
transparency. I have my own issues with money (mainly its
deficiency for economic transactions) but cryptocurrencies
are certainly a step up from it. But like you said, you
can't just release some new currency and expect the
government to bless it. Some empires had their armies, some
their navies, but we have our banks. Our empire is a
financial one, and a currency that replaces the USD is a
direct attack against the heart of the empire. Many
mountains would have to move before that is possible,
unless Wall St finds some extra utility in it that allows
them to extract more.
> the public to understand a little better how important
digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in
2024
100%...cryptographic identity is going to be huge in the
next few years (I'm betting on it quite heavily [1] ).
> AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer
level (though itâs largely a solution to itself as a way
to get information one could previously get from a search
engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by
making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to
meter, weâve had spam for a long time, but spam so good
itâs convincing to experts in anything other than a bad
mood? Thatâs new.).
Yes, exactly, LLMs as they are are a glorified search
engine. Search engines have consumed themselves trying to
tailor results to their users instead of just fucking
showing objective information and are becoming essentially
obsolete pay-to-play ad machines.
> The danger with AI is that it winds up being something
other than âavailable weightâ and
âoperator-alignedâ, i.e. whoever is the last man
standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince
anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by
anyone else.
Well, there's more here. As AI markets itself as this sort
of objective intelligence machine, it garners more and more
trust. As this solidifies it has the potential to shape
perception over time to the benefit of the
operators/controllers. The obvious conclusion is snuck in
advertising, but I'm thinking much more sinister like the
editorialization of information to protect the owner
classes and the state from any kind of scrutiny.
Effectively, a Big Brother that instead of using fear for
compliance, softly whispers in your ear. Pair this with the
immense surveillance apparatus we've spent decades
perfecting (but it's in the private sector! so it's ok!!1)
and we're setting ourselves up for a hellscape dystopia.
Definitely higher stakes, I'd say.
URI [1]: https://stamp-protocol.github.io/
dboreham wrote 1 day ago:
Faster, cheaper, possibly ceases to exist. If that happens there's
(supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting
on L1. The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove
to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?".
The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to
understand or b) not quite figured out yet. But first blobs..
hanniabu wrote 1 day ago:
> The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to
understand or b) not quite figured out yet.
Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs for
settlement
> The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to
some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?".
It's about data availability
> there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back
by exiting on L1
They're called escape hatches, you can view the state of each L2 on
L2Beat:
URI [1]: https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary
dboreham wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
> Rollups use either optimistic proofs or zero knowledge proofs
for settlement
Can you post an example of a code that implements either of
these? (the fraud proof, not the happy path)
I ask because in the past when I researched L2s such as Optimism,
that code was "to be developed".
rauljordan2020 wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
Hey! I'm one of the developers working on Arbitrum's next
iteration of optimistic proofs. It's a really fun problem of
many parties resolving disputes about a deterministic state.
Happy to answer any questions
everfree wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
I'm pretty sure that this is part of the code that implements
fraud proofs on Arbitrum One, which is one of the few L2s to
currently have fraud proofs.
Sequencer side: [1] Contract side: [2] It seems to me that
Optimism is lagging way behind - I'm not sure if they have
fraud proofs yet even to this day. I consider Arbitrum to have
"picked up the torch" so-to-say.
URI [1]: https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro/blob/d28682b9300...
URI [2]: https://github.com/OffchainLabs/nitro-contracts/blob/9...
kinakomochidayo wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
As far as I know, Optimism has fraud proofs on Sepolia
testnet right now
fwip wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
So, Ethereum "has blobs" now that "are provable," by an
implementation that doesn't appear to contain tests [0].
Crypto, stay winning.
URI [1]: https://github.com/search?q=test+repo%3AOffchainLabs...
everfree wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
What are you saying? There's a "test-cases" folder in the
"prover" folder you linked to a search of.
Not sure why it doesn't show up in GitHub's search, but
it's right there in front of both of our faces.
fwip wrote 21 hours 7 min ago:
Egg on my face, mea culpa. I checked all the places I
thought to for Rust code, and was astounded that the
search didn't turn it up.
mxwsn wrote 1 day ago:
Blobs are a temporary form of data storage that are only required to
be held by Ethereum nodes for 18 days. Archival nodes are free to
store it forever if they wish, with a 1/N trust mechanism to verify
an archived blob. Blobs contrast with permanent data storage in
calldata, which is very expensive (due to its permanence).
Layer 2's are currently significantly more centralized than Ethereum
L1, but this is not a fundamental technological limitation, and can
be improved significantly with more resources and time. L2s right now
have fragmentation concerns, where users have poor experiences
interacting with a ecosystem of 10+ L2s, but this is largely a UX
concern that can be solved in my view, and shared sequencers can help
this on a technical level. I wouldn't say Layer 2's have many
intrinsic fundamental technological trade-offs.
mypastself wrote 1 day ago:
A lot more centralized, in my view.
hanniabu wrote 1 day ago:
If you're going to leave a controversial comment like that then you
should back it up
jncfhnb wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs backed by decentralized voting consensus
dartos wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs decentralized in the same way lobbying a politician is
decentralized.
Unless Iâm remembering incorrectly, you need a ton of eth to
partake in eth PoS voting.
everfree wrote 1 day ago:
Distributed validator tech (DVT) has made it so you can
participate in PoS voting with much less ETH than was
required before, if you choose.
everfree wrote 1 day ago:
What do you mean?
bigyikes wrote 1 day ago:
Upvotes and downvotes on Hacker News. Itâs a joke with some
truth.
thomastjeffery wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
It's confusing because we went from "decentralized" meaning
"an inverted hierarchy" to "decentralized" meaning "a
hierarchy seen from the other direction".
hanniabu wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
Can you expand on that? What do you mean by from the
other direction?
thomastjeffery wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
Banking is a centralized model. Participantation in
banking can be said to be, from the perspective of the
participant, decentralized. The participant's
perspective on the hierarchy is inverted, but the model
itself is unchanged.
Etherium is a decentralized model. Its model is an
actually inverted hierarchy.
everfree wrote 1 day ago:
Oh. That's an uninteresting way to "back up" a statement
imo. Crowd wisdom is often wrong.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It
never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
jncfhnb wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
I agree. Voting systems are just generically dumb for any
sort of truth consensus.
bee_rider wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
Just a note, the person youâve responded to is
different from the person who made the âjoke,â (if
that is the right interpretation. I donât really get
the joke, fwiw).
It doesnât really make sense anyway; if the joke is
that the comment is âbackedâ by the fact that HN
users are upvoting itâcomment scores arenât visible
to people other than the posters, right? So all we know
is that it wasnât smote into the hidden state.
hanniabu wrote 1 day ago:
Correct, which is why they should explain their claim of how
and what is more centralized
Havoc wrote 1 day ago:
> proto-danksharding
Points for unique naming
lxgr wrote 1 day ago:
Also for transparency: I like how Ethereum doesn't even attempt
trying to make any of this appear accessible to curious outsiders.
pyaamb wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
if you enjoy learning from video, finematics is a great resource:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@Finematics/videos
pcthrowaway wrote 1 day ago:
Ethereum actually has excellent documentation... it's just that
there's a mindboggling amount of it. Apparently it's quite
complicated to make a worldwide trustlessly distributed computer
that runs on imaginary money which nonetheless needs to be secure.
ElevenLathe wrote 1 day ago:
Still less baffling than urbit!
ruuda wrote 1 day ago:
I used to think it had something to do with dank memes, but I
recently learned it's named after Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist
who came up with the idea.
twic wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
I believe he developed the idea with another researcher, Diederik
Loerakker, aka Protolambda, who contributed the other part of the
name:
URI [1]: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/danksharding/
k__ wrote 1 day ago:
Dank, rad and feist?
What a name!
somedude895 wrote 1 day ago:
There's a security researcher who calls herself Isis Agora
Lovecruft and I'm pretty sure it's not her real name. I thought
it might be the same with this guy, but Dankrad seems to be an
actual German name meaning something like "thanks for the advice"
fwip wrote 1 day ago:
I dunno, seems like a plausible trans person name, since we get
to pick our own. Also, their twitter profile currently
indicates that they use they/them pronouns, not she/her.
Hendrikto wrote 1 day ago:
As a German, I have never heard that name, but your translation
is about correct.
"Rat" as in "advice" is spelled with a T, but the name might be
older than that spelling.
pixelpoet wrote 17 hours 0 min ago:
Yep, Dankrad is "thanks for the bike" :D
somedude895 wrote 1 day ago:
I found it here: [1] Apparently the name Tanqueray, like the
gin brand, is related.
Names are fun!
URI [1]: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankred_(Vorname)
twic wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
Oh, so Tancred in English:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tancred
losvedir wrote 1 day ago:
And of course there's security researcher, Signal crypto
designer, and former HN commenter, Moxie Marlinspike!
DIR <- back to front page