For a while I have been losing faith in the crypto space, though I've known about it for a really long time I have never really made any significant money in it.
But I've been watching it with interest and what interested me the most was the governance aspects of it. But lately, when I look at the space, it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly. I think I am invited everyday on discord or telegram to this or that "DAO", which really are nothing but pump and dump scams with a coat of governance onto them.
I do wonder, is this a feature or a bug? Humans might be naturally greedy and maybe these hyper-marketized mechanisms simply bring out the worst in us.
But I will say, I really admire Vitalik and his vision, I read his blog and I love it. It makes me hopeful but maybe he might just be too optimistic. Things are not how we'd like them to be but how they are, this is a very important lesson in politics.
The NFT space seems to have supercharged pump-and-dump dynamic. While previously the grift seemed somewhat bound to technical people and early(ish) adopters, NFTs have brought in a tidal wave of "creators". The amount of hand waving in the NFT "chill and shill" Twitter spaces is such that I imagine arms are being dislocated from shoulder sockets.
With respect to DAOs, I still believe this is the most interesting crypto related innovation since smart contracts/dApps. I hope that the eventual bursting of the bubble doesn't throw this baby out with the bathwater. The democratization of capital raising, free flow of capital across jurisdictions, and rethinking of governance strike me as good things for all of humanity.
NFTs lower the capital required to "pump" because each token is one-of-a-kind and can be pumped individually. You also don't have to convince a bunch of people that your coin is going to be a valuable, new, currency (as with ICOs). Just that this single collectible (or "collection" of collectibles) is valuable. It helps that collectibles in general are experiencing a bull market (see Pokemon cards).
There are roughly two types of people who participate in (or previously participated in) the cryptocurrency space.
Those who are genuinely interested in one or more aspects (the mathematics, the technology, the smart contracts, the governance aspects, the anti-banking aspects, the innovation, and/or trustless funds transfer). And those who are primarily attracted to the space due to the potential for profit.
For the former group, it's a bug. For the latter group, it seems to be a feature.
In my experience, the former group are fading away. Either loosing interest as the space doesn't live up to promises, or driven away all the scammers and other shitty behaviour that seems to follow the people who are primarily attracted by profits.
In my own personal experience, I was attracted by the technology and really enjoyed learning about and improving on the technology. But I didn't like the general feeling of the space, so I've faded away. Even liquidated all my holdings so I never have to deal with the space again.
All of these Discord and Telegram "DAOs" are almost always scams. Crypto makes them easier, but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it.
It is hard to argue that "they don't represent crypto" when they are 90% of what people see, and many people's first exposure to it, but of course, they don't represent crypto. They bring zero innovation, except for the best marketing copy to bring in gullible victims. Real projects (for instance, zkSync) are a lot more quiet about their marketing.
> but they would probably still exist in some shape even without it.
I don’t agree. The people who run traditional scams know that what they’re doing is a scam, and they take precautions to avoid criminal prosecution. This deters general people from trying to do the same thing.
Crypto has this veneer of “innovation” and “disruption” that everyone has seen play out over the past decade, with huge winners (Amazon, Uber, etc.). And others are jumping on the bandwagon. They don’t believe they’re running a scam, or at least they believe they’re operating in the Wild West of no regulations and everything is fair game.
There are definitely people doing crypto stuff who would not be otherwise running cons on a street corner.
> "it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly ... is this a feature or a bug?"
There is no incentive to do anything properly in cryptocurrency development because it puts monetisation before use-case, so you get all the money up front with no commitment to deliver anything (whether useful or not) and can often remain anonymous to boot. Whether you call this a bug or a feature simply depends upon how scrupulous you are.
So within 7 years of the start of Bitcoin, pretty much every original Bitcoin developer had become disillusioned, with claims like it was "an experiment" and "has failed"[0]. We're now heading towards 7 years since the start of Ethereum, and it sounds like Vitalik is now too beginning to realise that it has turned into something a lot worse than what it tried to replace, e.g. because it magnifies the most terrible aspects of human nature.
Let us not think Vitalik was some sort of saint. Etherium was launched with a massive premine which the developers awarded themselves a sizable chunk of the supply before the network even came online. Not only was this pretty scammy in of itself, it also legitimized future shitcoins having similar amounts of premine
If I'm being charitable, it's hard to see Vitalik as anything other than naive/"useful idiot" to the commoditize-everything hypercapitalist forces. It doesn't take a genius to show some restraint in opening one pandora's box after another.
Some of the Bitcoin devs realized this early on. Ethereum, for whatever reason, didn't and it's been scamville ever since.
As for Bitcoin developers, that's not really true at all. There are quite a few that are active in ecosystem development and conversation on the bitcoinhackers.org mastodon instance and a few IRC/Matrix channels.
Unfortunately, Ethereum communities still seem to socialize and organize on centralized platforms like Slack, Discord, and Twitter.
I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed. I think crypto is interesting and has utilities, but its not going to solve global social coordination.
I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.
Crypto very much suffers from a chronic case of "one bad apple spoils the barrel".
There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities. Once prices started going up and and a bunch of people started using it as a get-rich-quick scheme, that rapidly became a vicious cycle with people like me started leaving the ecosystem in disgust, and we lost what pressure existed within crypto-adjancent companies to stay true to the original goals.
This article makes it sound that Vitalik is reaching that state of disillusionment as well. Shame, he's one of the last few "true believers" I know of.
> There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities.
This is one of cases where the term "crypto" is genuinely confusing. I'd easily believe your claim if it were about cryptography, but I'm highly skeptical about it as applied to cryptocurrency.
I wouldn't be surprised if, when the final history of cryptocurrency is written, its main effects will be judged to have been scams and linguistic confusion.
This seems like a repeating pattern: brilliant tech visionaries attempting to undermine political/financial power with technology. Every time this is attempted it's subverted either by the application of power (firewalls, censorship, KYC/obscenity laws) or money (acquisitions, embrace extend extinguish, advertising[1], astroturf/spam). It seems like there might be a persistent gap in STEM education where each new generation of hackers is unaware of the underlying societal reasons why such attempts fail and convinces themselves: "this time it's going to be different".
[1] By this I mean that if a platform decides to be ad-funded, they often begin to self-censor to stay in the advertiser's good graces. Over time this gives increasing power to large advertisers to control content - see: Youtube.
> It seems like there might be a persistent gap in STEM education where each new generation of hackers is unaware of the underlying societal reasons why such attempts fail and convinces themselves: "this time it's going to be different".
I think that's true. More broadly, I think it's a totally unfounded belief that computer technology can somehow transcend human nature coupled with a general ignorance, disinterest, or even contempt for non-computer technology.
Take cryptocurrency: in large part its original vision was rooted in contempt for law (a kind of social technology), which just meant it repeated a bunch of mistakes that have been solved in well-developed legal systems, with little to no value-add.
> More broadly, I think it's a totally unfounded belief that computer technology can somehow transcend human nature coupled with a general ignorance, disinterest, or even contempt for non-computer technology.
This is an excellent point and the crux of the matter. Technology, particularly software-related technology, provides an amplification effect of the worst of humanity.
I'm reminded of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the chimps discover bones as weapons. Well, now that bone is the Internet.
There's this belief amongst technocrats is that we can somehow be saved by technology. A good documentary on this is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
People try to do it with tech because it's easier, it's much harder to work politically to cause change. But ultimately that's what's required to enact real change, as we have seen the technical tools will be coopted by the political powers.
It's essentially the techno libertarian dream - build a profitable business that makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, profit and making the world a better place are pretty diametrically opposed given that profit is the centralisation of power and most social ills are caused by power imbalances. The error libertarians have always made is thinking that the problem of concentration of power is solely an issue with the government and not an inherent issue with markets.
> I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed.
Well, of course! If crypto is useful as a counter-balance to authoritarian governments, then the value of crypto is rooted in bad (other) government. Who wants to live in a world where all governments are shit but we can still move money around?
Crypto might be a temporary plaster over some wounds, but we still need to close the wounds.
My understanding is that technologists believe that this authority is founded on centralization, and if this centralization were removed, the authority would disappear. I, and likely you as well, don't agree with this at all.
No. Even with decentralization, we still need to have institutions, authority roles and hierarchical coordination.
What changes with crypto is that it gives people the chance to choose (a) who they affiliate with (b) on what terms and (c) allows unilateral disassociation at any time.
Think of it this way: imagine if getting citizenship to any country in the world was something that involved no bureaucracy and could be as cheap as getting a cellphone sim card.
Save from mass incarceration, there is nothing that authoritarian governments could do to stop people from participating in other economies. People would suddenly be able to participate in a "global market of governance models" without even necessarily having to relocate physically.
Authoritarian governments will of course try to stop this, but my bet is they will lose all type of support when the technology is accessible to the middle-class and they get to compare their relative status with the whole world, not just the local society.
This would lead (I hope) to the realization that governments are only necessary when they serve the people and that will be the most important piece to fix the current broken lack of "checks and balances".
We've got a glimpse of what could happen because of the pandemic and the millions of people who realized that they could do their job from anywhere in the world, and how lots of countries responded by offering "remote work" and "digital nomad" visas. Now imagine if more countries acting like Estonia and start offering "e-residency" programs. The countries would start competing among themselves to see who can attract the most people / most productive people.
It's the possibility of self-sovereignty that is important, not the actual realization.
Authoritarian governments do suck and I would love for them to not exist. But they coexist with oligarchs, who will only be further advantaged by unregulated markets.
The life of a tenant farmer in the Phillippines does not only suck because of Duterte; it also sucks because the wealthy family they work for is comfortable with inefficient plantation-based farming.
Now, its certainly possible that crypto could give people more access to the world market, and thereby improve their situation. Rural communities in Bangladesh now have YouTube channels showing the amazing talent they have for cooking. Its a weird world.
But there's a dark side to global exposure. Some Malaysians got rich from their global stock market in the 90's without having to relocate, but it didn't end well because the investment was in speculative consumer goods like real estate. Crypto doesn't have to end this way - it could enable real invention that would not be possible with rigid, local fiat currencies. But right now, crypto feels like a casino pizza party, and I'm increasingly worried.
Sorry, but you interjected a lot of assumptions, biases and opinions and are passing them as fact.
> oligarchs, who will only be further advantaged by unregulated markets.
No one is saying about "unregulated markets". The idea is about having regulations being localized and based on the principles of much smaller communities. Take the principles from Localism applied to "virtual city-states", if you will.
> wealthy family (...) is comfortable with inefficient plantation-based farming.
Because they have a monopsony on the labor. On a world where you can decouple "where you live" from "where you work", this goes right out of the window. And it goes both ways: it can be either because the locals leave the place because they can find better opportunities, but also because people from other, wealthier places might look at these places as an opportunity for a low-cost of life and cheap labor. Go checkout /r/digitalnomad and you will see how many people are already doing or planning to do such a thing.
For a more cynical person, this means "gentrification". For someone looking at things at a wider-scale, it means that people could eventually be able to do something that was only possible for the elites controlling multinational corporations.
> What changes with crypto is that it gives people the chance to choose (a) who they affiliate with (b) on what terms and (c) allows unilateral disassociation at any time.
In what way? Imagine NFTs take over as the mechanism by which we join and leave organizations. "Have you ever been a member of the communist party" is now a machine checkable property. Any organization can deny access to any person who has any affiliation (now or ever in the past) that the organization doesn't like.
Any organization can deny access to a public key associated with a person. The person is still completely free to create another identity and participate.
Identity centralization is inevitable. I do not believe that if the proposed future of DAOs mediated by NFTs comes to pass that it will be feasible to actually possess two public keys that both engage in various systems of any meaningful complexity and cannot be recognized as belonging to the same person.
I mean your affirmation re: "centralization of identity".
You can not prove that people identities can/will be easily correlated. If there are people handling multiple avatars successfully, you will see them as two separate entities!
I can't prove it mathematically, but it seems obvious given the development of web3 technologies, the motivations behind various organizations involved in these systems, the fact that tighter integration enables more desirable features, and the continued demonstration that it is super easy to reidentify people from all sorts of surprising places.
What you call "re-identifying" is basically correlating known identities across different systems. But what about alts?
You can quickly go to keybase and find out my "public" reddit account, and someone with direct access to reddit databases could even use the extra information to find some of my alts. But I can bet real money that no one could precisely look at any random reddit account and say "this account is/is not an alt from rglullis".
In a world where creating identities is infinitely cheap to create, you can not rely on identity as a mechanism for censorship or blacklisting.
> In a world where creating identities is infinitely cheap to create
Can you prove that this will be the case? Given that there is value in integration, I don't actually believe that useful identities will be infinitely cheap to create. In the same way that being able to set up a new email address with zero history doesn't actually mean anything when it comes time to apply to jobs.
You are moving the goal posts. The first issue was about denying access to someone completely based on one single identity. Now you are also trying to add the idea of having reputation as a requirement?
Anyway, it is still something to be managed. You just create multiple identities and you work with them to suit the target audience. To go with your "membership to the Communist Party" example, there is nothing stopping any actual communist to have an identity where they act as someone who is not a communist, and use it when needed.
> My understanding is that technologists believe that this authority is founded on centralization, and if this centralization were removed, the authority would disappear. I, and likely you as well, don't agree with this at all.
I'm pretty sure the authority (or power) spawns the centralisation, rather than the other way around.
Congratulations, you now understand how proof-of-stake works - and why it’s a bad underpinning of cryptocurrencies, although bad in a different way than proof of work. Destroy the environment or make the rich richer; pick your poison.
This is more or less true of the company stock of any startup that wins big, so I don't get the hate. If they managed to get stability, security, low transaction fees, and is actually useful to consumers, then it seems like it might be a worthwhile project?
The main difference is that startups add value to society through inventions that ideally improve our quality of life and put food on people’s tables through employment. Cryptocurrency investors do none of that; they just mint a bunch of tokens and roll the dice.
Cryptocurrency investors don't, but neither do startup investors. The question then is whether the startup produces anything of value to the world, so the analogous question is whether the cryptocurrency (not the investors) produces anything of value to the world.
I've personally used cryptocurrencies to bypass expensive international bank transfer fees when moving money between family members in different countries. To me, they had beneficial value for this. I'm not saying that's enough to warrant their existence, but saying they literally have no value whatsoever is clearly not true. So the question is whether they provide enough value, compared to startups. In my opinion, a lot of silicon valley startups in many industries (social media and advertising being big ones) also don't provide anything worthwhile to the world, so at least those are about on par with cryptocurrencies.
To me, investing in those startups is no different than investing in cryptocurrencies in the sense that they are equally negative forces on the world.
As someone who has been working as a blockchain developer for nearly 4 years, I find it funny when Ethereum fanboys tell me things like "L1 was not designed for this type of throughput", "the high fees are good" and similar things. You can tell they got into crypto and NFTs recently and they don't know the initial promises made by the Ethereum team at the beginning and are just trying to hold onto their hype bubble. Ethereum was supposed to be capable of handling the world's bulk of decentralized application and finance transactions, and Ethereum devs at some point where making fun of Bitcoin for having high fees, now they are making excuses such as "L1 was not designed for this." as the dApps are leaving for other chains. Truly a funny show of denial and cover-up.
It's not so much an excuse but a learned lesson: the decentralization trilemma is real.
Don't forget that Ethereum is still a research project. "Denial" and "covering-up" would only apply if the devs were still promising that the base-layer would scale by itself. But ask any serious developer and it is pretty understood that "(Complete) Decentralization, Security, Scalability... pick two" is how things will have to go.
I sincerely thought from the beginning that Ethereum was going to implode because its core conceit of running a distributed VM was too insecure. The last straw was going to a launch party for the token and seeing the kind of people that were there; one lady ecstatically saying "we're all gonna be rich" got my senses going "they're actors - they have no real ability to discuss this tech, it's gotta be a scam", and I went home and found other alts to go into.
Many years and thousands of faulty Solidity contracts later, I still haven't been entirely vindicated. I certainly missed the boat on the gains, though I still did OK overall with my other moves. As it turns out, both the type of dev and the type of investor Eth attracts have never really changed: both are a bit too awed by the raw tech and its generality to think through the application in more detail than "we can make it and you can buy it".
But hey, it worked, the party is now crowded with apes; it's probably time to exit, though, cause I can't see it staying like this forever.
"I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing" - I love this call for more active political positioning in the community. This is political, it always has been. Let's embrace it. AssangeDao and Ukraine raising millions, proof of integrity received a lot of support during this round of gitcoin grants, it really feels like the community is ready to push hard - expect to see more politicians/co-ops/unions/welfare groups forming as digital orgs with crypto backends.
How is that not an accurate characterization of the interview? For years, I was unsure if he was a grifter like so many in the space, or just hopelessly naïve about what he was building. This interview settles that on the latter for me.
I guess the question is if you're a glass full or glass empty kind of guy. I interpret a lot of this through a lens of optimism. Generally my read is that he wants to it to be more than bro's flaunting ape pics and wealth, and better of the environment. The rest of it isn't about how he's desperately trying to reign it in, but to offer some vision for interesting applications. Agree that he might have been a bit naive as a young kid building this thing, but I think he's a good thought leader.
Fair enough, but I think he’s still naïve. But not for nothing, he’s also becoming more and more of a central banker every time he says stuff like this.
I am truly and continually disappointed with the response to cryptocurrencies in this community. For a user-base that is so knowledgeable to be so pig-headed about this topic is frightening.
This is something I've had a hard time understanding. Any question, even honest questions, posed to the crypto community get spit back as if a person could not be any more wrong or ignorant of something. There's this battle of either 0% or 100% committed to crypto and no in between.
I have had a hard time finding genuinely honest and unbiased perspectives or even descriptions of things in crypto. Happy to know if anyone has any such sources. I'm still trying to honestly just learn about it more. Getting there bit by bit.
If cryptocurrencies were just neat technologies then the conversation would be very different. They are cool tools and allow for new interesting things to be built.
But it is very very very clear that cryptocurrencies are not and will never be a raw technological oddity that hackers can play with. Instead, they are things that fundamentally intend to change power structures and the relationships people have with other people or with organizations and institutions. That's not the domain of hacker expertise anymore. As such, discussion is more akin to discussing war or human rights or inequality. All of the "very cool technology" discussion is (rightly, in my mind) subsumed by the much larger discussion of "holy crap, look at the harm that this direction will do to humanity."
I don't think it is wrong to consider the impact on humanity above appreciating technology for technology's sake.
The kings of Web3 are the same as the kings of Web2. Big money investors and capitalism more broadly. Web3 accelerates surveillance capitalism. It is all of the mess of Web2 on steroids.
I've published papers in top conferences on EVM analysis. "Read more" is not an especially engaging topic of conversation.
Web3 does not change the systemic barriers that funnel users into platforms and frameworks. It does enable a small number of technologists to become operators while also enabling the rich to turn everything into financial instruments. Yes, some new nerds got to be billionaires. That's the same thing that happened with Web2. Nothing about the fundamentals have changed except now other people can bet on whether I'll buy Product X or Product Y.
> Continue to fight the tech tho, wonderful thing about web3 is you can't stop it, no matter who you are.
Perhaps not. "You can't stop it" is not itself evidence that something is a good thing.
I get the opposite impression here. The impression I get is that most aren't even tech people let alone hackers. They are here because they are not knowledgable and want to learn. This forum seems mostly media/business dominated than tech dominated.
Not really. The vast majority of the HN community that keeps rejecting cryptocurrencies, blockchain and everything related to them does so on claims that are obsolete, shortsighted and completely ignorant of the progress that has been done in the last years, if not of the ecosystem as a whole, as their opinions comes not from experience but from shoddily written opinion pieces. You can see it in your daily HN frontpaged crypto hate bait thread, such as this one. Only a few handful of comments raise genuine concerns and put enough effort to allow a constructive discussion, the rest is just people venting about how bad crypto is, with no actual insight.
You're saying people don't understand because they are not deeply involved.
It's a disingenuous argument, akin to no true scotsman, and a way to pat yourself on the back.
When you step back from the details and take a look at the big picture, you can understand crypto better than when you're too stuck in the reeds.
From the big picture view, you can see Crypto is destroying our planet, doesn't meet most of it's promises, squirms with new promises and redefinitions constantly, is much more complex than alternatives for the few things it does provide, and is rife absolutely rife with scammers.
Sure amongst that morass there may be a few interesting ideas, who knows and who cares, there's interesting ideas in lots of areas and crypto is a distraction from real progress, and it's a destructive force in our world. What a waste of human potential, and limited resources.
From the big picture I see that crypto is phasing out PoW, is currently in development, constantly finds new applications, although it still has a bit of a learning curve and is still not as user friendly as the traditional web, and yeah, it has a lot of scams going on. Doesn't invalidate the technology though.
> From the big picture view, you can see Crypto is destroying our planet, ...
Crypto is certainly not destroying our planet.
Yes, "Crypto" does have negative impact on ecosphere through its use of energy and other ressources.
But ... just look ahead, look left and right ... and unless you're walking some trail between the fields looking up from HN on your smartphone .. you're quite likely to see something that humans made.
And pretty much regardless of what it is, it'll have had a myriad of various ways of negative impact on the ecosphere.
Besides that, energy is only one of a many technological negative impacts on the ecosphere. Take the millions of destructive chemical compounds that get released through mostly non-Bitcoin technological human deeds.
To counter a potential whataboutism accusation: in most instances where the term gets thrown at someone, is my impression, it is just a poor way of trying to prevent the following.
When someone calls out some problem A and another person calls out problem B as a consequence, they are doing it to give some perspective, to have a reference for comparison.
Which is absolutely reasonable and useful to do. Why? Because not all problems of the world can/should be solved at the same time. There's simply not enough capacity/ressources/attention to do all. Problems need to be prioritized, which is a political/societal process.
To enable this prioritization, comparisons must be made between different issues and references brought up. Something that then gets decried as whataboutism.
No, "Crypto" is certainly not "destroying" our planet in the sense that it should occupy all those people's attention who claim that they're worried about the planet and trying to save it. Those people should turn their heads to their consumption of most everyday items/products/services and other topics.
Not really. The vast majority of the HN community that keeps promoting cryptocurrencies, blockchain and everything related to them does so on claims that are unsubstantiated, rose-tinted and completely ignorant of the environmental harm that has been done in the last years, as their opinions comes not from experience but from shoddily written opinion pieces. You can see it in your daily HN frontpaged crypto bait thread, such as this one. Only a few handful of comments raise genuine benefits and put enough effort to allow a constructive discussion, the rest is just people gushing about how great crypto is, with no actual insight.
> powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves
It doesn't move that money. It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money.
> the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs.
Yeah, no. Those products are a) not new, and b) most of them don't require either ethereum in particular or blockchain in general. It's all speculative smoke and mirrors, chasing investor money.
> Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong
Ah yes. "You're holding it wrong". This is the only outcome of crypto in particular and blockchains in general.
> Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects.
No, it won't. Because the tech not only doesn't solve these problems, but makes these problems significantly worse [1]
> ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world
No. The ultimate goal of crypto is exactly to play million-dollar games. Just because it was used to send pretend tokens to desperate people who have no meaningful ways of using them, doesn't mean it's accomplished something meaningful in the world.
> The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method
Blockchain and efficient in one sentence.
> Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up
I can't even.
And then they talk about how he "couldn't predict this", or "couldn't foresee that", or "watched with horror and dismay" when something easily predictable happened. All the while praising him for being "fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history."
Clearly he's "fluent" as in "he can come off as knowledgable in a Twitter thread".
See the link below for how all this was clearly predicted.
Useless and inflammatory comment. You just made a list of phrases that triggered you as you read and regurgitated generalizations, baseless claims and low effort snark and, to end it on a high note, a link to a crypto smear article from 4 years ago.
> Buterin’s favorite projects on the blockchain. Take Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up
> I can't even.
Proof of humanity is a really great project imo (especially in the face of things like worldcoins authoritarian approach). Its not perfect but it is working and doing what it says, theres around 15k people registered with many in south america earning more than their state pension. It also allows other organisations to bring 1p1v to their contracts. Theres some work to be done on privacy layers, but plans are in place. 1 move at a time.
>It moves around specialty tokens that people speculate are worth that much money.
If a particular item can be sold at a particular amount with predictable and transparent liquidity it is objectively worth that amount.
Ford doesn't speculate a Ford F-150 is worth $30k, they have customers lined up with cash in hand ready to buy and waiting lists (liquidity), therefore they are objectively worth $30k.
You wouldn't say 1 share of Amazon stock is speculatively worth $3,205. It's objectively worth that, because there's liquidity and an order book right now that will buy it for that price.
In the world of finance, speculation, or speculative trading, refers to the act of conducting a financial transaction that has substantial risk of losing value but also holds the expectation of a significant gain or other major value.
--- end quote ---
Crypto is the very definition of speculative trading.
And yes, stocks are as close to be to that as to be indistinguishable in my opinion
Your first point could be said about the NASDAQ or NYSE.
I'm not gonna respond to the rest because it's not worth the time and effort. Please go educate yourself on this topic before you hand-wave away this technology.
> Your first point could be said about the NASDAQ or NYSE.
Yes, it could. Stocks are pure speculation.
> Please go educate yourself on this topic before you hand-wave away this technology.
If only there was anything in the crypto space to, you know, actually refute any of these points. Alas, in the past decade none have materialized. For every well researched and argued article like the one I linked or the more recent like Moxie's there's inevitably a horde of "go educate yourslef join our discords" and literally zero equally researched and argued articles.
The article summarizes crypto’s cardinal sins. Chiefly:
> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich
So if it were a handful of Indian women it would be better?
More to the point, what was the author’s point? Are we to believe that the white men who’ve gotten rich on crypto did something untoward to get those riches? And if so, did they do the bad thing because of their genitalia skin color?
It is stunning that these kinds of lazy, unexamined biases are accepted in non-fringe media outlets.
The point is that it's made a group of people that are already generally rich, richer. If it made a group of Indian women it would be marginally better as there aren't as many rich Indian women as there are rich white men.
Either way, I think the bigger point is that it's made a small number of people very wealthy.
Aside from the fact that "white men" isn't a meaningful "group of people", the majority of people who became rich from crypto were not rich to begin with. In the early days, it was mostly nerds, programmers and young people who became interested in the technology. VCs and wealthy investors were relatively late to the party.
A lot of "sound money", goldbug types got in early like Trace Mayer and Max Kaiser and SV guys who had a lot of time on their hands because they were rich from some earlier Internet thing, like Richard Heart and the Winklevosses.
I'd be willing to bet crypto has made more Indian women rich than all the silicon valley startups combined. So its probably a move in the right direction?
Yes, a handful of indian women would've been better.
A major goal for cryptocurrencies as they were initially conceived is that they're a tool for social change. Becoming yet another investment vehicle for the people who already have access to a wealth of investment tools is a complete failure to achieve that goal.
A lot of people have long believed in cryptos ability to encourage decentralization and equality. And to disassemble existing power structures which predominantly benefit a very small collection of people.
It has wildly failed those goals if it’s merely achieved the same outcome as, say, wall st banking.
Which idea(s), specifically, would you be downvoting? My GP comment has net negative votes, so it seems you're not alone. But, since you commented on downvoting it, I'm curious what I've written that warrants a downvote.
EDIT: I did not realize I was responding to the wrong comment. Leaving mine intact to avoid speculation.
I did not downvote your comment. Please do not make completely unfounded assumptions like that.
Downvotes are for comments that do not add to the conversation (and should not be used for things you may disagree with), and my response clearly shows that I chose to continue the conversation because I believe it’s worthy of discussion and exploration as a topic.
> It is stunning that these kinds of lazy, unexamined biases are accepted in non-fringe media outlets.
It is what it is. With crypto you have all the tools to stay under the radar, it's the main selling point.
It's always white men who are not happy with just the riches but feel the enormous need to spew whatever opionion they have through traditional media and the interwebz.
You can't complain that journalists who are essentially haters and believe people are inherently bad (much like cops, detectives and attorney generals) then single you out as the bad guys when they inevitably come to the space and have to write a piece on it.
Just to give a quick example from non-crypto industries: nobody is calling out Sergey Brin, Larry Page or the French guy at the helm of LVMH.
That's because their jewish heritage coherently suggested them to just be happy having more money than God, stay under the radar instead of pursuing attention and sociopolitical clout.
> Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams
In hindi there is a saying "प्रत्यक्ष को प्रमाण की आवश्यकता नहीं होती|" ((bad) translation: The apparent does not require proof"). Look at any of the major figures in crypto, I don't see many "non white guy" people in there. Come on man, not everything requires us to do a study.
In journalism there is a saying, source your claims.
You don't need a study, but you need some sort of base to the claim.
Your anecdote tells us nothing, I know many non-whites who got rich from crypto.
Not everything requires a study, but when writing an article you should back your click/race-bait claims up with facts if you just HAVE to put them in there. Maybe just leave it out since it wasn't relevant.
I'm sorry but I don't think people need to cite sources in every sentence for every word. You are not going to ask them to cite the dictionary for each word, would you? So there is a balance, and I think we are just conflicted on where the balance should land. I think this problem is pretty apparent and you don't. What I can't figure out is are you just rules lawyering at this point or do you actually believe its not a problem.
As I've opined elsewhere in this thread, it's not so much about race in and of itself, as it is the same old story about rich white men getting richer despite people insisting "this time it's going to be different" about the benefits of crypto to society. It's important to read between the lines.
Even if you’ve made millions gambling on cryptocurrency, you are likely not among the “unfathomably rich” group mentioned here. And if you look at the crypto-wealth-to-owner-race data we know so far, it should become quite clear that white men hold the vast majority of the overall stake. So, same old story, even though (to many promoters) crypto was going to make the world a better, fairer, less corrupt, and more egalitarian place.
Have some, or even many, non-whites like yourself earned some wealth resulting from crypto gambling? Sure. But that’s not the point they’re making.
>Non whites like you couldn't possibly be interested in cool technology early on
did you just call me a non-white? it almost sounds derogatory in the context of your post. I guess since I'm just a "Non-white", my only interaction with crypto could have been through a lens of gambling, since I'm so unsophisticated and weak in comparison to white people (in your apparent belief).
Seriously, look at the tone of your posts, jfc. All of you morally superior self hating whites are the same, at work, on this shitty website, and in SV tech in general. At the very basal level, you actually look down on non whites, you think we're uncapable in comparison. The only respite I get from your type of racism is on places like 4chan, ironically, the most racist place on the internet. But at least there's some fucking moral clarity there
very nice of you to assume it was crypto gambling, rather than an academic interest in cryptography. I'm a crypto punk, through and through, in the classical "I used to go on sketchy IRCs as a kid" sense. I was telling people at college parties to buy bitcoin because I was a CS student, a long fucking time ago.
And crypto isn't about some unclear moral platitude that you have about some "egalitarian" paradise. It's about telling the government to go fuck themselves and having the freedom to do whatever the fuck I want to, without anyone knowing. Cryptocurrency was about buying adderall on the darknet, not "helping disadvantaged non-whites"
finally, the people who's faces are on the list of "crypto rich" are the people who failed. The real crypto rich people aren't known by anyone, because they know what they're doing
First, you're quoting a statement I did not make. Please do not falsely quote people.
Second, you identified your race, not me ("Pretty insulting to a non white person..."). And you're ascribing feelings to me that I do not possess, nor that have I expressed or intended to imply. I'm sorry you think that way, but it's simply not true. I truly believe that technical acumen is something within the reach of all races and that no race is superior. It is the financial means to leverage wealth into even more wealth that is unevenly distributed, and that distribution greatly favors white men. That's just an incontrovertible fact.
Everyone investing in crypto is gambling, regardless of race. So if you're going to be insulted by that, know that it's not a race thing; everyone can be equally insulted by that if they so choose.
>Ethereum is a single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi that is available to anyone with access to an internet
All analogies are incomplete and imperfect but I'd say a more accurate mental model would be something like this:
Ethereum is like a global database _with_ stored procedures.
The stored procedure language would map to the Ethereum programming language Solidity.
Computers worldwide run stored procedures to decide how to write the next block(s) in the database. (Consensus.)
Embedded in the above is the collective psychology and incentives that attract humans to do the above activity. (aka Proof-of-Work).
To see how simple explanations of Ethereum can leave out the mass psychology aspect, consider another example of an incomplete analogy: The Reddit Place experiment of 2017 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_(Reddit) )
We could say that Reddit Place 1000x1000 art canvas is a worldwide "Adobe Photoshop" that runs slower than a 1990s 486 computer ... which is sort of true... but doesn't really explain the whole phenomenon.
Reddit Place is really cool. Place, Hacker News, Reddit and other sites are like global Ouija boards that indicate what is currently interesting to the community mind. Wikipedia reflects what the community thinks is true about a particular subject. The item is fuzzy when it first comes to the attention of global mind but then gradually comes into focus.
Hacker News and Wikipedia are not any better if we add more computing power.
Ethereum is not like that. It requires bit accuracy since it deals with money and contracts. Ethereum would be have a lot more utility with more computing power.
No. You're being snarky and leaving out the main point of crypto: trust and coordination. Ethereum is the first shared computer that you can execute code with someone who's openly hostile towards you and guarantee that the code will execute and perform what it was written to do.
Think of it more like the patent system. A patent is just a publicly available description of your invention. You could write it up yourself and publish it to a website for $5 / mo, so why would you pay the >$10k it costs to work with a lawyer and file a patent?
It's not the description of the invention itself you're paying for, but the rights you get that make it worth it to file a patent.
In Ethereum, the "lawyers" and "patent examiners" are the other nodes in the network and the miners which enforce that the smart contract code ran as it was suppose to and can't be undone.
I'm not being snarky. I'm trying to understand the fundamentals because I'm all for the other aspects you describe but I'm wondering if it could be done with a more efficient computing system. Ethereum is not the final answer just like the 68000 was not the final computing chip (as beautiful as it was)
Yeah, I'd like to know the answer to your question too. The original Bitcoin whitepaper proposed the decentralized ledger in order to enable Bitcoin transactions. But somehow that got warped into decentralized ledgers being the cure for all that ails the world.
How does the Raspberry Pi comparison factor in to your quest of understanding the fundamentals? How is that metric relevant to the fundamentals?
I mean, if that's a fundamental point to be made, shouldn't you be able to purchase a machine stronger than a Raspberry Pi and take over the Ethereum marketcap? Maybe you can charge less for gas and win marketshare that way. After all, people are paying for the Raspberry Pi processing power... right?
Not the parent, and not knowledgeable about Etherium.
But does't such limitations fundamentally question the global ambitions of Etherium? Could you really run a global digital economy with such limitations?
To me it seems an apt analogy about the capacity of Etherium, assuming it is correct?
It's all sorts of incorrect, incomplete and misleading.
It also invokes the corollary that this virtual computer weaker than a Raspberry Pi is the most efficient computer processor on a realized dollar basis: what other computing system with less processing power than a Raspberry Pi is settling $10 billion dollars of finance per day?
It is settling 10 Billion dollars per day... barely. I don't think anyone can dispute that Ethereum network is buckling under the pressure (represented by rising gas prices). I am not sure if OP was trying to be snarky, but they do have a point. This system is not scaling well and the problem is how slow EVM is. It is valid to criticize that and I think this has even the insiders worried.
> In Ethereum, the "lawyers" and "patent examiners" are the other nodes in the network and the miners which enforce that the smart contract code ran as it was suppose to and can't be undone.
You will run into problems though (and Ethereum has had way more than a fair share of these) if people fuck up their code so that others can exploit the code with behavior that was not supposed to happen.
In the real world, you and the counterparty would meet with your lawyers at a courthouse and have a good chance of winning if your claim is solid. In the cryptocoin world, there are no such entities by design, and every error you make cannot ever be recovered.
To people in the know, is anyone working on algorithmic consensus for dispute resolution? (I understand the blockchain itself is a dispute resolution where each miner can disagree on the chain etc. but I think you know what I mean).
I am not even sure how it looks like but there are people smarter than me in the world.
What are you asking for sounds like a lot like Kleros (https://kleros.io/) which is a decentralized and scalable justice system providing for all kinds of dispute resolution and arbitration.
Unfortunately nothing about the people backing crypto fosters trust, and the long development times for features that remain vapor make the coordination side seem sus.
It’s humans trying to pass off yet another unfalsifiable (to the masses who lack resources to vet its logic) system of distribution of information, and avoid accounting for “bugs” that don’t effect them.
Why is that? Because that’s all humans are capable of. We don’t literally repeat history but we have often repeated rewriting flawed social constructs with new flawed social constructs.
Just because the math fits neatly in a book does not mean it’s fits neatly into human agency.
In that case you are screwed. The odds of every single validator turning against an individual is slim, however Ethereum is not above the act of rewriting history to undo certain transactions. They already did it once with the DAO hack and the market barely moved an eyelid when the supposedily permissonless and irrevocable world computer moves to protect those who are too big to fail.
It really doesn't seem slim to me. This article [0] (which was previously discussed on HN [1]) found that "just 0.1 percent of miners (about 50 operations) are responsible for half of all mining output". So it seems like a very real threat to me. I rarely hear anyone pro-crypto talk about this implicit assumption they make about the mining being "sufficiently distributed & diverse".
Allow me to be better. Top 3 mining pools control >51% of the hashrate today[1]. I can see 3 teams aligning to do whatever they want. I understand the standard argument is those pools actually represent thousands of individual miners, but the miners only have control over mining, not the selection of transactions (please correct me if I am wrong).
You are right. Whoever controls the pool controls what goes into the mined blocks, so there's a chance they could cooperate to forbid certain types of transactions. Mining empty blocks in Ethereum is something that happens from time to time too, but usually, mining pools want to include as many transactions as possible in their blocks, as this increases profits. So yeah, it can happen in theory.
However, the move to PoS will probably change this, as a valid block containing a "banned" transaction can't be easily disputed even by a majority, as long as the block is correct. The only way to try to fight it is to burn lots of ETH, meaning any pool that engages in such behavior becomes weaker.
Exploring this further, PoS seems to give the impression you need to control 51% of all Eth to control the chain. But that doesn't seem to be true, you just need to controlled the majority staked eth, which will probably be a much smaller number than all Eth. This means at equivalent cost of maintaining a large pool, you can probably take over the block chain.
Controlling 51% of all staked ETH is enough to launch some attacks, but the cost of the attack is way way higher than in PoW. The gist of it is that the community can reach a new consensus in which the malicious majority staked funds simply don't exist anymore. This means any single attack costs a lot of money, and there's a well-known recovery process to negate the attack and penalize the attacker.
Wouldn't this require a fork? I believe as eth gains adoption, forking will become less possible. I say this because asking big vendors/payment processors don't really have an incentive to change. Is there a way to do this, without forking the chain?
It's indeed a fork. Ethereum has shown to embrace forking as the tool of choice to update their own consensus, thanks in part to the lesson learned with Bitcoin, where the lack of incentives to change the consensus have resulted in extreme conservatism that prevents most changes. Ethereum has the Ice Age built into their PoW algorithm, ensuring consensus has to be renewed periodically. I'm not aware if there exists a PoS equivalent to this.
I don't think Ice Age protocol solves our problem, especially in a PoS setting. Ice Age tries to incentivize a move by raising difficulty till its unprofitable, the only equivalent I can see is decreasing interest rates for staked tokens. But once someone is in control of the chain, they just have to be clever about stealing stuff without raising too many alarms. I believe more drastic measures will need to be taken and consensus will need to be made between actual humans and no protocol can help with this.
"Stealing stuff" is not possible. All this time we've been talking about subtler avenues of attack such as delaying or banning transactions, or overpowering and replacing some of the blocks at the top of the chain.
Proposed blocks must conform to the rules. If not, bad faith actors can get their stake slashed by anyone else. Anyone doing anything outside that framework is not following consensus. Whatever they are doing, is not Ethereum. I'm not fully up to date on what could happen if part of the stakers keep on doing that, but I think that the result of that kind of contested fork would be that each part would be able to slash the funds of the opposing part in their own consensus. In short, it results in a split, with the good faith actors in one side. After that split, the good faith actors would now control 100% of the staked funds.
Btw, you're absolutely right on your last sentence. Consensus was and is always a social contract between humans. The protocol is just a neat way to distribute it.
Hmm... I was not aware that is how slashing works. So basically slashing would spontaneously result in a forked chain. At that point, how do people choose which chain to follow? Is that where human interaction comes in? As in, if enough people choose to follow one chain, that is the truth now. Even if people are running some nodes which follow other chains. Does this mean people who control the nodes are actually the ones who hold power?
Edit: BTW, isn't this what stealing a token would be?
> overpowering and replacing some of the blocks at the top of the chain.
People choose their chain by choosing the software they run on their standard (non-mining, non-staking) nodes. Dishonesty requires custom-made software.
Regarding "stealing a token": remember that even in the case a block gets replaced by another, both have to be valid blocks, containing valid transactions. This is why the most famous attack is a just a "double spend attack" and not any kind of money steal. Problems with tokens, that is, transactions that run arbitrary code, happen due to bugs in such code, not because of fundamental issues with the protocol.
I can't reply to your last comment, we're at the limit of comment nesting :)
Transactions are signed using public key cryptography. A miner can't modify a transaction present in the pool or make it up. Transactions need to be correct in order to be part of blocks.
This was the best conversion I have ever had about this topic. Now everything seems a bit more clear. Basically the only transactions we can "make up" is from wallets we already control because we will have the keys for it.
This is the bit I don't understand. A block is a set of transaction information which is chosen by the miner/staker. What's stopping them from just making it up? It will still be a valid transaction.
I had this impression too when I started reading about Ethereum.
I think, the mismatch is, while Ethereum is being sold as "the world computer" and being Turing complete, it's actually more narrow in scope, because if the points you just mentioned.
It's more of a decentralized and permissionless clearinghouse.
If you need storage, you wouldn't use Ethereum but IPFS/Filecoin, Skynet/Sia, or Arweave. For compute, you would use Akashnet (albeit a bad example here, but I don't know something better right now).
I don't know if there are plans to integrate features from other chains into Ethereum, to make it more general purpose, or if that's even possible. But right now multi-chain is where things are heading.
That's a fun analogy, but you're leaving out some stuff. For one, the virtual computer consumes 112.65TWh of power every year[1]. Importantly, the "gas" fees can only be paid in a special monopoly currency which you have to buy from a speculative market. IIRC you also have to pay for memory usage.
Ethereum has been moving to proof-of-stake this year for 5 years now. Will it happen some day? Probably. But we don't know how PoS will go for ETH once it has moved. Besides, there are many other negative exernalities that the move to PoS won't get rid of.
This video[1] covers a bunch and doesn't even mention energy usage much. Off the top of my head: rampant fraud[2] (e.g. so-called rugs in the NFT space and stolen artwork being minted as NFTs), financialization of everything, strong incentives to build intrusive DRM to enable "true" NFT ownership, creating incentives to hoard vs. invest thanks to deflationary currency, and loss of privacy (everything on a public blockchain).
Enabling fraud, enabling ransomware, enabling authoritarian dictators to enrich themselves. Furthermore there's still Bitcoin that will never move to PoS, and the popularity of ETH also swaps over to Bitcoin and other cryptos.
Yes, yes, there are also scams in fiat money blabla. The problem here is, that cryptos are a strictly zero-sum game and don't add any value to anybody except people who are able to dump their coins to the next greater fool. So why should we accept all these disproportionate externalities?
Stolen credit cards and chargebacks are a big problem. Fiat currency has a whole slew of problems. Mastercard, Visa, Stripe and PayPal don't allow at risk products like in-game currencies, porn, etc. They frequently use their powers to cut off funding for certain political targets.
I don't think simply yelling "fraud" and "scams" is enough to dissuade people anymore. New talking point please.
Honestly the anti-crypto sentiment here is ridiculous. I hope people know that the same people preaching against it here are gobbling up crypto as fast as they can while trying to dissuade others.
> I hope people know that the same people preaching against it here are gobbling up crypto as fast as they can while trying to dissuade others.
Only a person who extends their crypto-scam thinking to others would think this way. I can assure you that I don't hold any crypto, and that I'm pretty certain that the majority of outspoken crypto sceptics don't hold any crypto.
I don't know a ton about the subject, but I remember someone mentioning that existing Ethereum miners don't want to move to PoS[1] as it's a loss of income for them. Can anyone confirm/deny?
Incidentally, while searching for the topic I also found an article[2] from August 2021 with this quote:
> Meanwhile, crypto mining manufacturers like Bitmain and Innosilicon are on track to release new Ethereum mining machines this year, all while knowing that Ethereum’s transition to a PoS network is just five months away, effectively making those machines redundant.
Confirmed. Miners are angry about EIP-1559 that burned gas fees instead of paying them to miners and are even more angry about the transition to PoS where they will lose their income stream completely.
The computer I'm typing this on is using gminer to mine on the flexpool.io mining pool. But it's just using a computer I would've purchased anyway. Some miners have tens of thousands of dollars invested in mining equipment or more.
Took me a minute to understand what you were talking about. The context of my claim was, "Since transitioning to PoS, hash rate has only gone up". You seem to think it's disproved by the fact that hashrate has gone slightly down for brief periods in the past even before the transition to PoS.
Hashrate has increased from 14.86 to 1001 Th/s in the past 5 years and is at an all-time high. Since "transitioning" to PoS, it has not gone down.
So saying that "the hashrate has only gone up" implies the hashrate never goes down [between any comparison point], but you agree that over some comparison points as displayed by the five year graph the hashrate has gone down correct?
Yes, the hashrate graph has a positive slope over large time series, but it does go down at various points along the time series so therefore saying "the hashrate has only gone up" is a false statement.
Respectfully, you are reading English words like a robot and completely ignoring the context of the conversation. Similarly, if I were to say, "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse" it would not be helpful for you to whip up calculations thereby proving my stomach is not large enough to accommodate the volume of horse meat necessary to make this true.
I have run into this in about 1 out of 50 interactions on HN over the years and I find it most helpful to point this out and mean no disrespect by it.
It was moving to PoS last year and the year before that. Now it's June, but I heard probably delayed to July.
One telling thing is that ETH miners not only haven't sold their GPUs they're continuing to buy more at greater than MSRP. It's unlikely there will be a good alternate coin to mine after ETH. Some are planning to move to ETC (Ethereum Classic) but it can't absorb the hashrate of ETH and be profitable.
ETC currently has 24.46 Th/s while ETH has 961.14 Th/s. ETC price has been going up dramatically in the last week ($25 to $40 per coin) but it would have to go up about 20x more to absorb that hash rate.
Well it does mean that people deeply involved and informed about Ethereum, who have SKIN IN THE GAME, don't believe the public information about the change.
Not surprising really, shell games with insider information being traded against the sheeple is a core aspect of the crypto industry. Who knows if this time is just like the last time and all the times before?
According to this Carl guy[1] POS eth will consume 2.62MW (or 22.9512GWh annualized) which is better, but still quite a lot of power for a single core raspberry pi.
I'm sure you understand how disingenious calling it 'a single core raspberry pi' is even if you dislike crypto. Please attempt building say a DEX with comparable guarantees, uptime and traffic if you believe they serve the same purpose.
Because it's like calling tents useless because of how much better flats are due to pipes, electricity, insuation and so on. In both cases you are focusing on some metrics while specifically ignoring the usecases where tents/Ethereum can be used in a way flats/pis cannot be.
Thanks for elaborating, but I disagree with your assertion that I'm being disingenuous.
When I compared Ethereum to a Raspberry pi I was continuing the comparison from the root comment. The point of the comment was that, although POS would produce a significant reduction in power consumption, it would still consume a significant amount of power compared to the computing power of the network.
Discussions about if Ethereum has extra utility that offsets that extra powerdraw is outside of this comment thread, since the restriction that consider Ethereum as a "global single core raspberry pi" are given by the root comment.
I didn't mean to (and don't think i did) present that in any tricky way, and I think you're projecting an argument onto my comments that I'm not making.
More or less, with the addition that many people are running the computer in near lockstep allowing a consensus on the true global state of such a computer and so for its execution to be trusted.
I love pen and paper but I just took a look at the Build Back Better bill and it's almost 2500 pages with I'm guessing thousands of edits by hundreds of parties. Pen and paper wouldn't be my first choice for this task
No one wants a globally distributed ledger. They want to send money from one person to another. Or, to use the example that motivated Vitalik, they want a record of the items they own in a video game. A globally distributed ledger is simply a tool to accomplish that. As long as Ethereum represents a "single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi" (despite the fact that it utilizes an enormous amount of real computers), it is utterly incapable of solving those problems at any sort of scale.
Take Augur, for example. A prediction market without a trusted resolver seems pretty useful, but the fact that a blockchain can't handle any real world application on-chain meant that it was unusable.
Another example is that it's ridiculous on its face that CryptoKitties was able to bring Ethereum to its knees. People want to base real financial markets on this tech when a trading card game is able to congest the network and increase fees 10-fold?
So essentially you may have thousands of computers trying to write to the same file at the same time so you implement a consensus mechanism to determine the final write, something like an n-way diff
But I've been watching it with interest and what interested me the most was the governance aspects of it. But lately, when I look at the space, it is really difficult to see any real meaningful interest in doing things properly. I think I am invited everyday on discord or telegram to this or that "DAO", which really are nothing but pump and dump scams with a coat of governance onto them.
I do wonder, is this a feature or a bug? Humans might be naturally greedy and maybe these hyper-marketized mechanisms simply bring out the worst in us.
But I will say, I really admire Vitalik and his vision, I read his blog and I love it. It makes me hopeful but maybe he might just be too optimistic. Things are not how we'd like them to be but how they are, this is a very important lesson in politics.