I wouldnt worry, the whole system up to this point has used "technobabble" as a means to confuse and impress outsiders. When reading up on it, there is no meaning to find besides "yep, its a linked list allright".
There's a lot of slang and jargon (metaphors, some good, some silly), to the point where most crypto projects are scams, hiding what's going on (many DeFi projects built on Ethereum).
And this is my opinion as someone who loves the value proposition of what cryptocurrency was supposed to be (see first line of Satoshi whitepaper), and care more about seeing the technology gain mindshare than hype cycles and price movement.
A randomly chosen crypto project (including ones that use Ethereum) will probably be mostly nonsense, but Ethereum itself is a serious project with interesting deep engineering.
What technical projects have no impenetrable to outsiders terms at first glance? Try to read information on React, Django, Tensorflow or whatever software project you like from the PoV of an outsider and tell me you won't find plenty of jargon, metaphors etc.
But those also aren't ponzi schemes offering 1000's of % APY based on convoluted multi-token staking schemes, minting, etc. that directly interact with money (as tokens) you send it, potentially breaking SEC rules because of what it means to be a money transmitter (low bar).
(Overall I'm talking about a bunch of tokens/dapps on Ethereum, not Ethereum itself, BTW.).
The latter. Or both: there isn't really a distinction between blockchain and scams. On the merits, blockchains are inarguably a regression on the status quo; philosophically, they solve problems that don't exist in reality. (Censorship is a non-issue.) They exist for one reason only: to provide a faster vehicle for money seeking return. Prior to blockchains, a 100M fund would have to wait ca. 10 years for a ROI; now, due to lack of regulation and etc. etc., you can get a return in 12 to 18 months. That's it. That's all there is.
You're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts; proof of stake is not 12 years old (Sunny King and Scott Nadal, 2012), and certainly there have been a lot of other hard problems solved since then.
There's a lot of other stuff beyond Ethereum, too. Privacy coins in particular look very little like what was envisioned in Satoshi's paper.
Whether that's all worth anything from an economic perspective, I'm not sure (and even less sure whether it's worth what it's valued), but crypto is legitimately a bunch of very clever technological solutions to hard problems, invented by actual hackers, so I'm a little sad to see people minimizing it on Hacker News.
Especially since this particular innovation is ameliorating the whole global warming problem, which is the prime criticism leveled at crypto. Take that away, and isn't it just open source software that we're talking about here?
Crypto is one of the primary grounds for hacking right now. Not just hacking in the sense of writing code, but hacking in the sense of defining a system from scratch.
Cryptocurrency is so quintessentially hacker that hackers have a "no true scotsman!" moment about its ascent.
Similar feelings abounded with this thing called the Internet if you look in the archives.
Edit: Yes, it's raw. Yes, it's messy. The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this. Look in the history of computer science and tell me that the Internet's origin was materially more orderly than the chaos that is web3. It's always a mess until it becomes boring, and then we do the dance again.
> The beginning of every new era of protocols is always like this.
No it's not.
Web2 exploded largely because of XMLHTTPRequest which from the second it was released was simple to understand, simple to use and solved an immediate problem.
To this day I'm still yet to find a problem that Web3 solves uniqely well other than money laundering, sanctions evasion etc.
> To this day I'm still yet to find a problem that Web3 solves uniqely well other than money laundering, sanctions evasion etc.
Many of cryptographical constructs of the past 4 years were and are spearheaded by blockchains, in particular fast signature aggregation, threshold signatures protocols and zero knowledge proofs. This translates to protocols for:
- voting.
- splitting a critical company secret between say the CEO, COO, CFO, Head of HR, Compliance, Legal and requiring 4 out of 6 to sign off critical actions, without ever revealing that secret.
- proving that you did or you own something without revealing what. Which could be quite interesting for law enforcement for example.
It's a decade josh and it's still unusable for 80% of people on this planet. I was as excited as everyone was in 2012 but that plateu is just going on and on.
Seems to me like adoption has gone backwards in some regards. Look at companies like Steam which at one point were accepting bitcoin but then pulled the plug on it. I also don't know anyone that owns crypto for any reason other than as an investment.
Adoption? More like, speculation. I still don't know anyone who's doing any real world transactions with crypto, but I know people who hold it for speculation purposes.
Adoption has mostly increased thanks to centralization, via exchanges, which seems antithetical to Bitcoin's foundation. What's the number one use case? Speculation and scams.
I have a question to people who were around and have a memory of the times because I don’t as I was not born yet. But does the crypto thing feel similar to how the internet started in the late 80’s and early 90’s before finally taking off?
I recall some videos/articles dissing internet as a passing fad at that time - does anyone who remember what it was like then think the crypto industry going through something similar?
The utility of systems like email was very quickly apparent, and while the 90s web was much more about publishing structured information than any sort of interaction, again it was pretty immediately recognised as a powerful, useful thing.
I don’t recall any negativity to “the internet”, but a lot for the dot com hype cycle, which is what I think cryptocurrency most closely resembles, but it has dragged on for years
HN is -in essence- a collection of vocal minorities. Post something on Kubernetes, and you'll get every Linux Sysadmin complaining about how it was better before the age of containers and we didn't invent anything new. Post something on cloud infrastructure management, and you'll get people somewhat angry about its cost. Post something on Electron apps, and you'll get everyone to talk about how C++ and QT apps outshine them in 2022. Post something on crypto, and, you know, it's going to be about how it's not used, too complex, or too energy inefficient.
Good news is, those topics change and become more accepted after some time. It's an endless cycle of Bash-and-Move-on. If something is "too popular", then it's obviously the worse technology ever, according to HN.
sending money to family in countries with harsher financial systems, being able to donate to causes you support without it being traceable to you (through tornado cash and zcash/monero), being able to move large amounts of money instantly with minimal fees and no intervention, etc.
I don't understand why people are so excited about computers, integrated circuits have been around since the 60's. You have companies like Intel and AMD coming out every year with announcements like it's some new thing.
I remember the silk road, and bitcoin donations to wikileaks, and bitcoin pizza. I think it all got bogged down after that with the irrational exuberance of the bull run, and everyone was too distracted to pay attention to the XT dispute when it really mattered. But it is getting better now, I am optimistic that the crash will continue and we'll see sanity returned to cryptocurrency.
The problem is fundamentally that cryptocurrency requires network effects to work. Cryptocurrency is not an easy thing to explain to most people, and it can be quite dangerous, so the best thing you can do for new users is tell them to stay away.
imo, Silk Road deserves the credit for solving Bitcoin's chicken-and-egg problem with network effects.
a single enterprising dealer could have started it off - exchange rate basically didn't matter, as long as someone was buying and selling BTC, it'd work to keep the dealer's identity private. SR tapped into a massive new market, regular people started learning about crypto so they could buy drugs, this created a flow of money through the market. honestly, I was excited to see my friends using Tor and buying BTC for cash - it's the gritty, cypherpunk dream!
whenever there's a real market opportunity like that, network effects don't seem to get in the way. Monero and Zcash got very popular from all the ransomware, though I'm admittedly less exuberant about hospitals being ransomed than drugs.
Maybe if you turned your mind off 12 years ago. Fast Zero knowledge proofs only left the research labs a handful of years ago and are now being used to power layer 2s that deliver 10 - 1000x scalability improvements. DeFi is barely 2 years old.
The consensus and scaling mechanisms being rolled out were only just created in the last few years (that's why Ethereum PoS took so long, thery were still making changes to the design as new research came out).
A. 12 years old is relatively new for tech / computer science. There aren't that many novel / widely adopted computer science ideas introduced each year.
B. This "merge" in particular utilizes innovations in computer science that were non-existent 12 years ago when the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published.
C. There continues to be loads of cutting edge CS research that is broadly applicable to the entire industry but is being spear-headed by blockchain development, for example work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
BLS signature aggregation was finalized as an IETF standard in 2019. It's the reason Ethereum can support over a million staking nodes.
BLS was invented back in 2001, but was expensive to verify. A paper published in 2018 showed how to verify n aggregated signatures on the same message m with just 2 pairings instead of n+1.
to be really pedantic, I'd say PoS is an economic breakthrough rather than heavy-duty computer science, strictly speaking. the actual math of the consensus algorithms seems relatively simple, the challenge is aligning all the incentives so that adversaries in a group of anonymous people have nothing to gain by subverting the rules.
I will gladly give a Turing award to whoever formally proves the safety and liveness of Gasper like Lamport did for Paxos.
I could say the same thing about reading fields I don't generally understand, and it can seem like "technobabble" because I don't understand the meaning of words they are using, since some things are written with a certain audience in mind that possesses the knowledge to understand the content, like many academic papers.
However, I don't regularly dismiss fields like that, but rather I understand that not everything is meant for me to understand without a deeper meaning. Not sure why anyone would treat the (technical) ecosystem of cryptocurrencies differently. Seems like a non-curious way of acting.
Just like I realize the problems pornography introduces to the world, but reading and speaking with engineers working at those companies are still a fruitful endeavour for me.
Genuine research states claims for the methods and discovery, making it often quite easy to work backwards from the conclusions to the theory. No such logic seems to exist in the crypto culture.
Here’s an example of a well-hyped, well-funded crypto startup being loose with words that have well-understood technical meaning outside of crypto.
> The "Helium 5G" network is instead a 4G LTE CBRS network, which right now has significant advantages over 5G but doesn't have the "5G" moniker Helium and its partners wanted for marketing. So it's just calling it 5G because, apparently, anyone can use any word to mean anything.
> In the current architecture, specific transactions, including Proof-of-Coverage and Data Transfer Accounting, are processed on-chain unnecessarily. This data bottleneck can cause efficiency issues such as device join delays and problems with data packet communications, which bloats the Network and causes slow processing times. HIP 70 proposes transferring these processes onto Oracles which will resolve these issues and further stabilize the Network.
There's a bunch of jargon, but for "Oracle" read "EC2 instance".
thought we were talking about open source community research. i'm not here to get into the debate of if crypto has a scam problem, it does. but that isn't research.
The comment you accused of “just saying things” was referring to crypto culture, rather than research specifically. I picked Helium because it was something that the web3 community glommed onto as a “successful” use case.
I wrote "no such logic [of adherence to formalized and academic research standards of claims and so on] .. doesn't exist in relation crypto culture."
I was clearly defining the entire practice of formal research as a null set within the crypto set.
Crypto culture is a compounds noun that's additive absent declination of sub distinction.
About Helium you assert that token has some kind to recognition and beau regard for- I really don't know what you're talking to but if I was sub editing your comments for clarity, I'd use the word Kudos. You claim this 5G access token has community kudos "glommed" or "attached to it" but in actually read the papers for Helium when first announced vector of investing adjacent to private 5G networks (UK Gov lets you drive truck throughout publishing network licenses awards since 2016) absolutely nothing but a more expensive convoluted and arbitrary code for the putative but barely functional exchange of on demand cellular next generation service.
If can possibly convey only one insight into what we're discussing to your everlasting benefit it sure would definitely be giving you a innate sense for why any discussions or even detailed research into things that you can build out of Lego isn't mathematical geometry or symmetry learning but model box picture building the prettiest parts you purchased.
Fully distributed consistency algorithms running on N nodes on linked list in which each node is a Turing-machine program run concurrently on N nodes, whose consistency shall also be insured, and which can write on said linked-list. Everything has absolutely tons of edge-cases related to the distributed nature of the thing to take care of.
Of course, I haven't even begun anything about the whole "crypto" part, and minimizing power usage.
Absolutely no meaning besides "linked lists", riiiight...
I thought the same at the beginning. Yet somehow I think I'm missing something a bit more complex (complicated?) than just "linked lists". I don't want to understand only the theory but also the "practice" (e.g., one could read all about distributed systems... But one really gets the gist of it until one has to deal with real world networks in the cloud or on prem, dealing with real systems)
Try to imagine you are building a new banking system, and you want it to be secure.
How would you
A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number
and
B) ensure that, even if those payments were secure, there was no other cheating, such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million?
Generally speaking the way to handle those requirements is by employing cryptographic signatures and public blockchain(s), and the result is usually referred to as a cryptocurrency.
> A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number
You can use PKI for this. The public key is public and the private key never has to be online. That's how (most?) crypto works, but the system doesn't have to be a cryptocurrency to work like this.
> B) ensure that, even if those payments were secure, there was no other cheating, such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million?
You can have public ledgers without crypto, there's usually no reason to do so, and good reasons not to do it (privacy, funnily enough).
Crypto is _a_ solution for this, not _the_ solution, and not even the best solution at that.
Since you are using PKI but not a blockchain, it sounds like half a cryptocurrency to me.
I didn't actually say "cryptography" for the block chain. What do you propose other than a block chain for the public ledger? And if your system uses cryptography for the transaction security and has a public ledger, why would you not call it a cryptocurrency? It would seem to be in the same category if you ledger was secure.
> What do you propose other than a block chain for the public ledger?
A csv file, SQLite file, mysql database dump, ... The blockchain is a distributed, trustless ledger, which is not necessary for most applications.
If I may paint a picture of why this matters with an example from the gaming industry - simply because I'm familiar with it: There are projects being made where the inventory/achievement/whatever system lives on a public blockchain, so that you may use/display it in another game, website, whatever.
But this already exists without blockchain! If you play Spiral Knights or Half Life on Steam, you get a hat in Team Fortress 2. There are various third-party websites where you can display your Steam/Team Fortress/Dota/LoL achievements, inventories, ... because those 'ledgers' are public already. You can trade Steam items on third-party websites (which interfaces with steam underneath) that dodge Steam's 30% store tax and will actually pay money out unlike Steam.
The above applications only require public (or even just shared) ledgers. Distributed and trustless is not a requirement for these use cases.
> And if your system uses cryptography for the transaction security and has a public ledger, why would you not call it a cryptocurrency?
You could just as easily transfer USD, GBP or EUR using such a system. The currency itself need not be 'crypto' for the system itself to use cryptography for transactions. You wouldn't publish such a ledger for obvious reasons, but technically you can.
> If you play Spiral Knights or Half Life on Steam, you get a hat in Team Fortress 2
A centralized MySQL database is not a "public ledger" in the same way that a decentralized blockchain is considered a "public ledger."
In the former, the database can be removed or censored easily by the central entity controlling it. This includes issuing API keys: the central controller decides who has permission to access, use, modify, and even retrieve the data.
In the case of a "decentralized, permissionless, public ledger" blockchain, no single entity controls the data structure.
> A centralized MySQL database is not a "public ledger" in the same way that a decentralized blockchain is considered a "public ledger."
A public ledger is just that, a public ledger. It need not be distributed nor trustless to be public. The novelty of blockchain is the distributed and trustless, but most applications (as I outlined in the example above) only need to be public.
Trust me, I understand that a database dump is very different from a blockchain ala bitcoin, in exactly the ways you described, but that doesn't mean we need to shove blockchain everywhere.
I concede with this and your earlier point, you don't need a blockchain to build a new banking system. The current banking system is evidence of that: there is no blockchain needed when you ask your bank sends your funds to another bank.
But if you want to build a system that is not wholly dependent on "banks" and centralized actors securing consensus of financial transactions - which is effectively Proof of Authority - you end up having to look at alternative consensus mechanisms like Proof of Work or Proof of Stake.
The same logic applies to something like game assets. People buy and sell game assets already without a blockchain, but they do so only through centralized custodians and intermediaries.
>But this already exists without blockchain! If you play Spiral Knights or Half Life on Steam, you get a hat in Team Fortress 2. There are various third-party websites where you can display your Steam/Team Fortress/Dota/LoL achievements, inventories, ... because those 'ledgers' are public already. You can trade Steam items on third-party websites (which interfaces with steam underneath) that dodge Steam's 30% store tax and will actually pay money out unlike Steam.
That ledger is controlled/can be edited/changed by Vavle. Valve can delete your inventory and there is nothing you can do. Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of having a public ledger that no one can modify on a whim?
The first one is easily solved with one-time-use card numbers, which credit card companies have offered for well over a decade.
The second one is a dubious benefit if you're at all interested in stopping crime (eg money laundering is very easy if no party can block a transaction.)
Thats not to suggest there's no benefit to ETH, or even that crypto might be better than traditional money in some ways, but those two specific points are fairly easily argued.
> A) allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number
We have a whole bunch of these systems, like Open Banking payments in the UK, Pix in Brazil, and to a lesser extent stuff like Apple/Amazon pay and other payment proxies which don't require you to expose account numbers to merchants. Physical credit-card transactions work this way too, as the chips have built-in cryptographic processors.
> such as people at a bank just deciding to initiate an account with one million?
This is not a problem people really have. Having a limited quantity of your means of exchange is not a desirable quality in a currency.
Credit card transactions may at some point involve cryptography, but at the bottom is the credit card number, and that can still be exposed.
Cryptocurrencies don't necessarily have to operate on an (effectively) fixed supply, and actually if you are concerned about modifying the supply frequently it is possible to design a cryptocurrency that gives you much better control over that.
> Credit card transactions may at some point involve cryptography, but at the bottom is the credit card number, and that can still be exposed.
That's not really "at the bottom of things", for physical, customer-present transactions which I was talking about there. At the bottom of things are private keys stored on the card, which sign the transaction. Exposing the credit card number gets you no more than having someone's cryptocurrency wallet address, in fact a lot less as you can't look up their balance. The idea that credit card transactions are simply the handing over of a number, that a merchant can then do with whatever they like, is very outdated, though I guess still makes sense in countries that haven't moved on from magnetic strips.
Yes, plugging in your card number online to buy things is still distressingly popular for various reasons, I agree we should definitely get rid of it. And we can! Either by reforming the credit card payment process in the sort of way Apple Pay online payments and Paypal already have (though they still use the numbers themselves, it's true), or by ditching cards entirely and going with things like open banking payments and pix, which tend to have OAuth under the covers (among other measures) that don't involve 'card' infrastructure at all.
The question was how you design a system from the ground up that will "allow for secure payments without giving away something like a bank account # or debit card number". Well, I would use these sorts of technologies (that already exist and are in widespread use), rather than a blockchain.
It's amazing how superior you've let yourself feel while not addressing anything.
Was I supposed to have a revelation that cryptocurrency is the answer, in some sort of holistic come-to-jesus moment? Sorry, no, cryptocurrency is still a crapfest.
David Chaum opined then “As the Web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them”https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
Not sure how this opinion relates to failure, but just in case, things only got worse since.
Have you seen the "Line goes up" summary by Dan Olson?
It puts the crypto sphere into context. From that many descisions and marketing practices start to make sense.
Crypto being full of grifters does not mean that the actual developers in the space are using "technobabble" in order to sound smarter without actually introducing new concepts. Crypto is actually innovating in ways that are broadly applicable to computer science in general, e.g. with all the work being done on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. And those innovations require new words because they are new concepts. I think it should be somewhat obvious to anyone that has actually looked at the space that devs are not just re-naming existing ideas.
Again, the two things are not mutually exclusive. Most people/orgs can be applying blockchain tech in ways that are not actually useful (or are actively harmful), but that doesn't mean there aren't people in that same space doing novel work that requires new terms in order to communicate with other experts/researchers/developers efficiently and effectively.
In that video he searches for the griftiest projects and treats them as defining the whole technology. Suggesting it as an answer here is like responding to a question about how eBay is engineered and showing off the scammiest eBay auction pages you can find by searching for the lowest-rated users.
I actually thought Line Goes Up was pretty well informed and well-presented. It's definitely one-sided, but I think there were only a couple of statements that I found questionable.
I work in the crypto industry, and definitely agree there's a ton of innovation in the space, but the innovations lie at an incredibly technical intersection of cryptography, game theory, and distributed networks. Get marketing, sales, and investment capital involved in the mix (which almost every project has), and you have a bundle of products being thrust in front of the public which they can't rigorously evaluate, and because everything is directly incentivized, tons of scammers, grifters, liars, and fraudsters.
When my non-technical friends ask me about crypto, I'm happy to tell them some of the things I think are really cool about it. But I don't recommend buying anything based on my perspective; it's basically gambling (even if you're well-informed)
Well yeah this is how he gets paid. It's not about being informative about a class of technology, its about generating clicks to get more patreon subscriptions and youtube ad payments.
The "innovation" in the original blockchain is that it is computationally expensive on purpose, to create "economic value". There is no computer science innovation there. Computer scientists didn't come up with the idea because it made no sense.
No, the goal wasn't to create economic value. The goal was to make it prohibitively expensive to recreate the chain and thus fool someone else. Satoshi did not say that the purpose of PoW was to "create economic value".
Proof of work blockchain is nothing technically complicated. Nobody was doing it before because it makes no sense technically. The only reason it is used is because it adds economic value. Anyone using it for other purposes could use something else but wants VC money.
Okay then tell me how you can make a distributed ledger with global consensus without a consensus mechanism like PoW or PoS even with “no economic value”
But cryptocurrency doesn't really solve these in a technically interesting way, as it's neither consistent nor available under partition. The pressure to keep the chain consistent and unified is a purely social one - your BTC is only valuable to other people on the same chain as you.
I don't know, looking into the papers that are written in crypto research, especially in academia, it seems like there is a lot of very technically interesting stuff going on, especially with zero knowledge proofs for example...
These are largely (if not completely) applications of existing zero-knowledge algorithms to blockchain data, not the application of blockchains to solve some difficult ZK problems or make a useful-outside-of-blockchain novel ZK construction.
I'll leave the question of whether it's economically interesting to economists and sociologists (though I suspect the answer is it's not at least in this regard, as the pressure to use the same non-blockchain currency seems not too different across the sweep of history). The claim was:
> It turns out that "distributed linked list" is actually a difficult problem that involves very interesting challenges
Are you saying it's easy? The PoS algorithms I've read seem quite complicated, and honestly quite interesting. Also there is a lot of academic research about this stuff, some of it private, some of it public.
I mean, I know there are people out there who think that, for example, particle physics is totally uninteresting, and you are of course free to decide that a given research area is totally uninteresting, but you can't expect others to agree. It is just your opinion
The internet is fundamentally little more than the ability to send 1s and 0s from point A to point B.
So you mean like me calling you and saying 0 1 0? Well, yeah kind of, but faster! And we can even have conference calls! It's going to change the entire world! Yeah, ok... Well, I'm going to leave now. Wait, sorry... I mean I'm going to '0 1 1 0' now. Wow, I can feel the world shifting already.
The applications of a technology often are far greater than the most simplified fundamental upon which it is built.
