
Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later - feross
https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/11/22/progress.html
======
jkhdigital
I literally spent the past week reading a couple dozen papers on
cryptocurrency attacks, in service of a term paper which should hopefully turn
into a master's thesis (and possibly more during my PhD campaign). I'm pretty
damn pessimistic as a result. Smart contracts basically throw all of your
consensus guarantees out the window because they can cause arbitrary exchanges
of value in the application layer, which can be used to incentivize miners
into all sorts of shenanigans.

All of this research is producing a fascinating array of solutions in search
of problems. Fun stuff to think about, but I suspect that the added complexity
will only create a system that is just as prone to fraud and abuse as the
existing centralized order.

~~~
fxtentacle
Plus there's the problem that smart contracts cannot be easily modified if
they are found to be buggy and that one can always reverse engineer them,
because they're distributed to everyone.

These two together have already caused lots of damage
[https://hackernoon.com/yes-this-kid-really-just-
deleted-150-...](https://hackernoon.com/yes-this-kid-really-just-
deleted-150-million-dollar-by-messing-around-with-ethereums-
smart-2d6bb6750bb9) and they make most real-world uses impossible.

It is pretty much impossible to sell anything digital with smart contracts,
because due to the source code being accessible to everyone you can always
figure out the password, key, or secret URL to whatever is being sold. Without
paying for it.

~~~
alanfalcon
The best smart contracts don't need to be reverse engineered, they've got
shared, verified source code. The bugginess is a real problem as you've
pointed out. The "impossible to sell anything" couldn't actually be farther
than the truth from all my experience buying and selling NFTs. Over $150,000
USD worth of digital collectable game cards have been traded this week alone
over at [https://opensea.io/recent](https://opensea.io/recent) \- everything
is based on cryptographic signing and verified ownership on smart contracts,
and it works great.

~~~
simias
Digital assets are obviously the best possible use case for blockchains and
smart contracts, but can it really work outside of that use case? And even for
that use case is it really more convenient than centralized solutions?

From what I can tell browsing through this website those digital "assets" seem
to be yet another speculative outlet with some limited gamification on top.
It's cool from a technical perspective but where do we go from there?

~~~
alanfalcon
We're going to get the Metaverse from there, eventually! And it will be
glorious. A great definition of the Metaverse and what role blockchain may
play in it: [https://soundcloud.com/siggraph-spotlight/30-tim-sweeney-
and...](https://soundcloud.com/siggraph-spotlight/30-tim-sweeney-and-the-
metaverse)

I can confirm that the blockchain is way more convenient than centralized
solutions for buying and selling digital assets once you get over the initial
friction (which is still way too much). The keys here are open standards,
composability, and trustless atomic transactions. As a user, I basically look
at ethereum as an in-game currency—and the game is the whole of the ethereum
gaming space (still nascent, yes, and polluted by a great many scammy
speculative shell games) rather than a single game.

As for working outside of digital asset use cases, there are certainly a large
number of people trying to get it to work though I agree the use case is much
less clear cut. Without exactly agreeing with Vinay here, I at least
appreciated the perspective he shared in detail on this episode of the
NonFunGerbils podcast: [https://nonfungerbils.com/podcast/3-vinay-gupta-
indexing-the...](https://nonfungerbils.com/podcast/3-vinay-gupta-indexing-the-
physical-world)

------
busymom0
Your site's SSL cert has just expired at November 24, 2019 at 1:00:59 AM
Eastern Standard Time

Safari, Chrome give errors now.

~~~
dcsan
is there a mirror somewhere? article seems interesting.

~~~
fwxwi
State of browsers in 2019: asking your browser to bypass an SSL error is so
hard that it's easier to ask for a mirror.

btw, if you use Chrome and you see an SSL error, just type "thisisunsafe" and
it will load the webpage. Try it here:
[https://expired.badssl.com/](https://expired.badssl.com/)

------
optimiz3
Some hubris in this post. Claims ASIC resistant PoW is "Solved as far as we
can", with Ethash being the near end-all of hashing.

Random-X is a significant step towards ASIC resistance, requiring near general
purpose computation to perform efficiently (i.e. if you can build a better CPU
than Intel/AMD/ARM, you've already won).

[https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md](https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md)

(Random-X requires code JITting, large CPU caches, compliant floating point,
SIMD, hardware AES, as well as large amounts of system RAM, and other things.)

Innovation continues. If you stop having ideas, step aside.

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
This is what I really dislike about owning crypto long term as a store of
value. It's a cat-and-mouse game with hardware and software development, and
there's a lot of faith in maintainers to stay ahead of the threats.

~~~
Hendrikto
I‘d rather put my trust in an open source community than in centralized banks.

~~~
Nextgrid
Just wondering, unless you’re doing something illegal or are targeted by the
government and your money is at risk of seizure, why would you keep it in
crypto with all its associated risks instead of in a bank? Banks are highly
regulated and so can’t just run away with your money.

~~~
hippich
Couple points:

1) If we are talking about central banks such as FED - non-QE QE happening
right now in the USA could be good example of why one would not be want to be
part of the game.

2) If we are talking about centralized banking as a group of banks operating
under the rule of the government - similar question to yours could apply to
the general cryptography - why you need it (unless you are a criminal) if the
state protects your rights? We seen countless examples where it doesn't quite
work like that.

I really want you to consider that desire to not be forced to use the only one
available medium of exchange does not mean someone wants to do something
illegal (also, try to define illegal in the very general way, that would apply
equally in the USA and in Venezuela, and in Russia, and in Somalia =))

~~~
jgalt212
> 1) If we are talking about central banks such as FED - non-QE QE happening
> right now in the USA could be good example of why one would not be want to
> be part of the game.

Crypto doesn't get you away from this. Not to sound like a mediocre Ashton
Kutcher film, but it's all connected. In short, too much fiat, cryto prices in
terms of fiat will go up and the converse is true as well.

The only way crypto wins or is THE place to put your money is if the entire
world stops using fiat money.

~~~
hippich
Even more than that - crypto developers can decide they want to have more than
21m (or whatever fixed number) of coins out there changing the whole mechanic
of it. But it is one fork away if majority disagree. Try to fork USD.

------
broodbucket
It's such a shame that useful proof-of-work is so impractical. The amount of
cycles spent mining for the sake of mining is pretty depressing.

~~~
wyldfire
Besides proof-of-stake, there's also a coin that tries (tried?) a proof-of-
work with greater public utility: Primecoin [1]. It creates Cunningham chains
of prime numbers [2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain)

~~~
toastal
Wasn't there also like CureCoin that unfolds proteins for medical application?

~~~
haakon
Yes, and there's also SolarCoin which rewards users for producing renewable
energy. The problem is that these coins are centralised, so while they may be
very useful for what they do, they don't solve the same problem as proof-of-
work coins which aim to be decentralised.

------
hodder
The biggest problem is actual uptake for real transactions, as opposed to
speculation and black markets.

The 2 biggest barriers to be solved are:

-lack of trust/ease of use for the layman

-volatility

These problems may or may not sort themselves out with time.

~~~
wlesieutre
Even if I could use it for regular transactions, I’d still need a reason to
want to.

If the justification is “you don’t need to pay credit processing fees” then
things would have to be priced cheaper. But I think you’d have to pay me more
than the credit card fee to give up the ability to do chargebacks for a lot of
online transactions.

Maybe I’d use it for making donations where I’m not expecting anything back
from a transaction that the other party could fail to deliver.

They’re just not solving a problem that I have.

~~~
skohan
I think there are some use cases where it makes sense. For instance, I have
somewhat of a split life between the US and Europe, and I really wanted
cryptocurrency to succeed as a cheap way of moving money between currencies.

I played around with bitcoin a bit in 2015, and it back then it was a pretty
good experience. Transactions were quick and cheap. The problem is it seems to
have gotten less usable in almost every way since then.

~~~
solveit
Bitcoin certainly got enormously slower. But the other major currencies
(ethereum, xrp, etc) are both much faster and more liquid than BTC was in
2015.

~~~
omarchowdhury
> Bitcoin certainly got enormously slower.

[https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-
confirmationtim...](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-
confirmationtime.html)

Average block time data doesn't agree with you, or are you talking about
something else?

~~~
skohan
It's not about whether the next block will come on time, it's whether your
transaction will be in it.

~~~
omarchowdhury
That has only been an issue around the Dec '17 congestion. I can have my
transaction mined in the next block for the satoshi equivalent of $0.61 today.

~~~
skohan
That's interesting, I didn't know it speeded up again. I guess it still is an
issue though: it's hard to trust a currency with the knowledge that it's
transaction speed could potentially slow down by hours or days if there is too
much traffic.

------
beefield
Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants
in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside
illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second
elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is
that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is
ignored.

~~~
lawn
What's actually funny is how people still believe that no use cases exist.
Here are just some examples:

* Uncensorable donations

* No way for a third party to freeze your payments (internet is full of horror stories of PayPal)

* Not all businesses can accept digital payments (marijuana stores or porn have trouble)

* Credit cards and payment processors take a 2-4% cut, of all transactions.

* You can use cryptocurrencies anonymously (to for example buy VPNs)

* It's possible to flee your country with some of your wealth intact (for example by converting to Bitcoin and crossing the Venezuela border)

~~~
cyphar
Excluding the transaction fees problem you mentioned (which cryptocurrencies
also have -- while it might not be 4% it's definitely not 0%), all of the uses
you listed are really just one use-case -- uncensorable transactions. Don't
get me wrong, that's a very good feature of cryptocurrencies (assuming that
you have the ability to transform crypto back to real money on the other end),
but you should be aware that your list of use-cases is only one element long.

I also want to point out that the use-case of "get your money out of the
country" is not exactly perfect for Bitcoin because of how volatile it is
(imagine if someone had to get their money out during December 2017).

~~~
dunkelheit
I'm struggling to understand if uncensorable transactions are a good thing
(note: struggling not in a sense of "I actually think it is evil but let's
hear your bullshit arguments so that I can easily debunk them", but in a sense
of really being undecided). I am not a libertarian so I don't think that laws
are just a useless form of violence. So how can uncensorable transactions be
useful for a law-abiding citizen? One thing I can think of is when a
transaction is in the gray area - you do it without asking anyone and then can
argue that it is legitimate from a relative position of power, similar to
asking for forgiveness instead of permission. Another thing is that existence
of uncensorable money can push nation-states to adopt more equitable and just
laws. But of course there are downsides in enabling crime and so on. So is
uncensorable money a good thing in aggregate? I don't know.

~~~
cyphar
The most obvious example I can think of is when WikiLeaks (or pick your own
politically-unfriendly charitable cause) had their PayPal and bank accounts
frozen -- people donated using Bitcoin because the transactions couldn't be
blocked by private companies. There are also several other examples of
completely legal but unfriendly-to-large-corporations transactions -- in the
several US states where marijuana has been legalised it is still difficult to
conduct non-cash transactions with the proceeds because most payment
processors are under federal jurisdiction thus making it possible for your
(completely legal) funds to be seized.

~~~
asdff
You are always at the mercy of your platform. But wikileaks could have
continued accepting cash in the mail instead of being sidelined by a third
party service. And at least with legal pot the tide is quickly shifting to
make traditional banking easier; there was talk in LA about opening a
municipal bank kinda for this purpose.

For most people, the utility of sticking your money into a volatile and slow
system with no recourses is just never going to be there. A municipal credit
union would be more useful and offer an out from private for-profit banking
for most people.

------
dnprock
I consider myself fairly knowledgable with cryptocurrency. I create and run a
crypto project myself. I read this post and maybe understand 10% of it. This
is probably the rate of things I read from Vitalik. Either Vitalik is
extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his
opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem.

A warning for those who think getting a degree is useless. At least, it will
force you to think deep about some problems. I hope Vitalik will find his
focus and really solve a concrete problem.

For those who think I'm 10 times less smart than Vitalik. Here's my take on
Ethereum and its prospect.

[https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/16/ethereum-and-
computer-l...](https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/16/ethereum-and-computer-
language.html)

~~~
jasonzemos
> Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking
> about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the
> whole Ethereum ecosystem.

Vitalik started out years ago with writings consisting entirely of self-citing
the Ethereum echo-chamber. Judging by the citations here he's starting to
understand the value in the works of the established institutions, tenured
university professors, and career cryptographers -- people whom it's obvious
in his circles are either loathed as some irrelevant elites or simply, wholly
unknown.

Now that Vitalik has spent the last few years actually surveying the last
decades of theoretical achievements in the literature, maybe it's time to
build a secure distributed world-computer. Oh wait.

~~~
dnprock
LOL. I can't stop. :)

I'm not going down the path of personal attack. Vitalik is smart. He lacks
self criticism and focus. I do hope he'll find success.

~~~
Huycfhct
Depending on your goals. He raises millions with bad ideas. From his
perspective he is wildly successful

~~~
jasonzemos
What is he really supposed to represent? Skipping all the hard work, middle-
fingering the system, and getting rich quick? That's worth at most 15 minutes
of fame, and a long long time ago. Mr. Buterin isn't in jail simply because no
government has the slightest fucking idea how to parse this massive exabyte
jumble of cryptocoin hodgepodge over the last decade.

Meanwhile, thousands of poor souls have been lost in the basements of
universities doing real honest-to-god useful work which may never be
understood and used by industry, or even see the light of day; they lack this
disingenuous excessive hyper-promotion and the means to compete for media
attention with our favorite cult heroes like Vitalik.

------
sincerely
In a space absolutely filled with hucksters and scam artists, vitalik is
legit. Good read.

~~~
snitko
Vitalik and ETH are the definitions of scam and scammer. He's very good at
obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they
always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. And ETH is
the same: it obfuscates its uselessness and nonsense by being overly complex,
every year employing new terms and coming up with tons of code that only
increases the attack surface and complicates things even more.

~~~
dang
Please don't cross into personal attack. It degrades discussion. Maybe you
don't owe every person better, but you owe the community better if you're
posting here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
arcticbull
None of these are the actual hard problems in cryptocurrency and the fact this
is the focus speaks volumes. The real hard problems are:

1\. How do we stop using more power than Switzerland to process 4 transactions
per second (lol)

2\. How do we stop payments to international terrorists and rogue states.

3\. How do we stop money laundering.

4\. How do we stop price manipulation by fraudulent actors.

5\. How do we allow people who lost access to their money by negligence,
fraud, theft, act of god or otherwise, access to their money again.

[bonus] how do we generate the right quantity of new cryptocurrency so that
the pace of money growth matches that of economic and population growth so as
not to disproportionately reward early comers just for “being early”?

You know, the “currency” problems and not the “crypto” problems. These are the
actual hard problems of cryptocurrency and until solved it will never, and I
mean never, reach mass adoption, making the questions from the article totally
irrelevant.

~~~
emsimot
1\. I don't know if it will work, but the idea is Proof of Stake (ETH2 in
Ethereum-land)

2\. You can't -- this is a cultural problem, not a technological one

3\. There's no such thing as money laundering

4\. Peer-to-peer, transparent finance infrastructure

5\. User-money as a layer on top of cryptocurrency

~~~
arcticbull
> 1\. Proof of stake.

This has yet to be proven, and as you say, there’s reasons why it has yet to
land. I give this one vitaliks sideways smiley face.

> 2\. You can't -- this is a cultural problem, not a technological one

Uh, one that doesn’t exist in the current financial system. I’m sure y’all
will find a way. As I said, it’s a prerequisite.

> 3\. There’s no such thing as money laundering.

Hilarious. I see someone never took compliance training at work. With that
attitude I’d love to see you explain your position to a judge. Money
laundering is literally financial transactions arranged in such a way as to
conceal the original source of funds.

> 4\. Buzzword soup.

> 5\. More buzzword soup.

More buzzword soup that immediately falls down as once you use crypto as only
a bulk transport instrument you’ve lost out on all its ostensible benefits. No
transparency, no security, it’s no better than just using a wire transfer.

~~~
weego
_Hilarious. I see someone never took compliance training at work. With that
attitude I’d love to see you explain your position to a judge. Money
laundering is literally financial transactions arranged in such a way as to
conceal the original source of funds._

I though anonymity and legal safeharbour were founding principles of
cryptocurrency? The original comment is correct that what we call money
laundering is an artificial construct of power.

------
carty76ers
I usually hate the cryptocurrency articles that get posted here, but I do like
this one — a decent overview of technical challenges & possible solutions

------
olivermarks
The hardest problem of all is getting consensus to put in front of regulators
whose legal frameworks are stuck in the early 90's. SEC Securities law is the
800 pound gorilla on the globe and the workarounds 'offshore' of the SEC
(Malta EU framework etc) are pea shooters against this reality. I've been
involved in a european utility token against a real asset (Beer) which is live
but it has been very time consuming and difficult to navigate the regulatory
maze.

------
Jd
The original Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency was my favorite talk from Vitalik
ever:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXRtJcNVfQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXRtJcNVfQE)

------
Zamicol
"Cryptographic obfuscation"

Wouldn't this be a subcategory of homomorphic encryption?

------
elamje
Can some people from the crypto space give a quick tl;dr of what’s going on in
the space that’s of note? Seems like I hardly hear about interesting stuff
after the bubble burst (kind of at least).

Are there any people using crypto to actually do work for clients and solve
fiat currency based businesses problems? I am curious if the crypto start up
space is mostly filled with crypto-to-crypto services or if there are many
successful crypto-to-regular business cases.

Edit: I’m interested in if there are many people making meaningful money from
doing client work or building a business, mostly in the crypto space. There
seems to be two camps: crypto idealists that don’t care about making money,
and the crypto application people who might be a little idealist, but also
want to make money here and now. This is more geared towards the latter.

~~~
davidmurdoch
I build blockchain development tools at Truffle (a for-profit company). Most
of our efforts are on Ethereum tooling, but not all, we are building some
tools for enterprise blockchain tech as well as other public chains.

I think most of us here believe we are building tools that will have had a
role in the long-term future of (decentralized) finance.

[https://trufflesuite.com/](https://trufflesuite.com/)

~~~
crispyporkbites
How does truffle make money?

------
troquerre
Vitalik linked to our help article on Handshake's airdrop as an example of a
proof of excellence alternative. It's ssl configuration was broken before but
it's fixed now: [https://help.namebase.io/article/4vchu01mec-handshake-
airdro...](https://help.namebase.io/article/4vchu01mec-handshake-airdrop-101)

------
baby
Interestingly, advances on currency stability are much more interesting than
this post make it sound like: Libra backed 1:1 with a reserve, grincoin with
its forever inflation model, and even tether with its controversial fractional
reserve.

------
NoblePublius
TLDR: “ Great theoretical progress, pending more real-world evaluation, plz to
buy more magic beans. “

------
k5hp
That moment when you click on the first paper referenced in the article, and
the author is the professor of the lecture you currently should actually study
for

~~~
mindentropy
Lol. What is the lecture you are studying for? Who is the author?

~~~
k5hp
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10434.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10434.pdf)

The author is Roger Wattenhofer. Currently taking his Computer Systems class
at ETH.

------
cft
funny how his SSL certificate expired.

------
moralestapia
Expired SSL. Buterin's attention to detail is why I trust Ethereum so much.

------
regisg
It's funny to write such a blog post without even mentioning Cardano...

~~~
capableweb
It's even more funny to leave a comment like this without even elaborating on
the argument and not contributing to the overall discussion. Why would this
blog post mention Cardano?

~~~
flowless
Because Cardano is what ETH might have been if done right. They did a tons of
(actually scientific) research on the topics mentioned in this article but the
author won't mention Cardano as it is his direct competition (even nicknamed
Ethereum killer).

~~~
capableweb
What does "actually scientific" and "real research" (mentioned by jki275)
mean? I'm pretty sure most people doing research in the cryptocurrency space
are trying to use the scientific method as much as they can.

------
snitko
Whether or not you're aligned with Bitcoin political values and goals, please
don't be duped by Ethereum. It may appear as something useful, without the
stigma of Bitcoin being black market money. However, you ONLY need black
market money. Everything else that's ok with being regulated, does not need a
blockchain. The hard problem that Bitcoin solved was "How do we create money
that wouldn't collapse and lose value once outlawed". The proof-of-work
solution cannot be replicated (for reasons I won't go into here, homework for
you). And that's a good thing.

Ethereum is a scam and has always been a scam from its inception. Multiple
reasons for that:

1) Overly complex, obfuscating its lack of problem to solve by having lots of
features and code

2) Constantly coming up with new terms and features and "new hot thing" to try
and pump the price and keep the interest going.

3) No real world use case. Only promises and cryptokittes.

4) Literally controlled by one guy (see the now famous "Can you guys stop
trading" quote).

5) Only produced scam ICOs with 99.99% of ICO projects practically stealing
money from investors with no repercussions whatsoever.

There are many more, but the thing to remember is - Bitcoin solves a real
problem: it allows people to escape and bypass existing financial system and
continue doing business, save and not be subject to policies outside of their
control. It is black market money which governments hate and will try to
outlaw in some way. That is the real pain Bitcoin solves for people: not
agreeing to unjust laws peacefully and quietly exiting the system.

~~~
seibelj
Ethereum is a blockchain for general purpose computing. It’s not a scam, it
delivered what it promised. MakerDAO, mentioned in the post, is a cool and
useful project running on Ethereum.

I agree with you about the core use case for Bitcoin currently being an escape
from the government-forced financial system. It pierced the monopoly
successfully. But the Ethereum screed is just lies at this point, Ethereum is
one of the good ones.

~~~
snitko
What has it delivered exactly? Where is it being used that's not itself a
scam? MakerDAO - which seems to be some sort of token issuance thing - has no
real world mechanism for enforcement. That is, if an autonomous decentralized
organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce
your rights for whatever this token represents? This is the thing that ETH
fanboys are completely delusional about. Securities only work because state
regulators enforce the laws guaranteeing their value.

~~~
EGreg
How about being able to raise money for a project, and whitelist investors,
without people having to trust you to send them the securities after they send
you the money, and them seeing exactly what is being done with dilution or
whatever instead of having to trust?

Or having a fair pricing model as investors buy in using a bonding curve,
eliminating priced rounds and other crap, pg said that’s the “future” -
Ethereum makes it possible.

All this is only possible because enough gateways trade ETH that it can now be
considered money. And it can be used as an input to tons of cool smart
contract things. You couldn’t do this stuff 10 years ago, at best you’d have
some sorta hookup to Stripe API and banks.

~~~
snitko
Explain the mechanism by which people who invest can exercise their rights as
stakeholders, receive dividends etc? Who's to enforce they actually own
anything? What's stopping this project from taking all the money and producing
nothing (which is exactly what happened with pretty much every ICO out there)?

~~~
camdenlock
As far as I understand it, all that matters is the logic of the smart contract
code, and possession of private keys. Humans are removed completely from the
process. If you own the private key involved in a transaction, then that is
the guarantee you’re looking for. All that’s left is to examine the smart
contract code in order to figure out what sort of contract to which you’re now
a cryptographically-guaranteed party.

No person enforces anything. Only the math does. And I think that’s entirely
the point.

~~~
buboard
> Humans are removed completely from the process

Do you have an example of an organization that works this way, 100% automated?
It's hard to think of a system that can be 100% foolproof, there is always
someone somewhere that has to trigger something manually, and that 's the weak
spot.

~~~
camdenlock
Nope, I don’t. And I’m not a particular proponent of this approach. This is
just how I understand it.

I think the ultimate goal is to have smart contracts which don’t require any
of the human intervention you’re mentioning. How that’ll be possible remains
to be seen...

------
pron
Any progress on the problem of cryptocurrency being a vastly inferior solution
to far easier ones, almost on every metric, in virtually every use-case?

------
onion-soup
Oh shut up already with big block phobia. BSV proves that big blocks is the
most rational way to scale. The small block mantra started by blockstream
completely rotted the crypto space

~~~
zhoujianfu
I agree, although I’d say BCH proved it first. :P

~~~
onion-soup
BSV is a fork of BCH

------
Huycfhct
️ after year of this technology being around still this is the best article HN
can upvote. Be a sceptic and a scientist

