What, precisely, are you looking for cryptocurrencies to “show” you?
Transactions work today. Plenty of people use them for exchanging actual value, quickly and anonymously (or pseudonymously) across the world.
> If cryptocurrencies are so good at transferring money what's stopping them from replacing existing solutions?
Why would the financial industry do anything to encourage the adoption of crypto? It strips them of their power. They rely on you keeping and sending money with them - the democratized platform of cryptocurrencies are a potential threat.
> Literal billions have been poured in the tech
Sorry, billions have been poured into a worthless speculative market. The developers are not receiving billions, they are still volunteers. And yet there has been a massive amount of development in the crypto space over the past 12 years. NANO enabling instant transactions, XMR allowing for privacy, etc.
> how long it'd be before cryptocurrencies actually delivered on that mythical "tech" and we'd get actual mainstream real world applications […] Can I get an update on that?
I ask again, what exactly are you looking for?
In terms of real-world usage, well, crypto has been used for years. Drug/Darknet markets, for one. Ransomware for another. These are stress-tests for any currency and prove that crypto can work to exchange value in a real market setting.
Further adoption is really up to people, and it will likely happen anyways as the technology improves. A lot of work has been done, but there is a long way to go.
Those aren't real market environments by a long shot and far from stress tests. These markets have transactions that are low-volume but high-value. Me, what I'm looking for is something along the lines of "How many grocery transactions globally can crypto do per second?", i.e., high-volume, low-value. Now _that's_ a stress test.
Quick Google survey tells me that BTC can do 10 transactions per second _tops_. That's far from a workable state of affairs. It's not even "promising tech".
They are definitely real markets. You buy something at a free market price and get something in return.
They are definitely stress tests in that they prove that crypto can be used as digital cash. You can not buy drugs safely with a PayPal, Zelle, wire transfer, or ACH, but you can with Monero. This fulfills the original vision of cryptocurrency: decentralized, uncensored exchange of value without being at the mercy of another.
There is not really a more difficult stress test that tests the ideal and purpose of cryptocurrency.
> Me, what I'm looking for is something along the lines of "How many grocery transactions globally can crypto do per second?"
Again, why does HN expect crypto to be perfect today? It will improve over time. For what it’s worth, today,
- NANO transactions confirm instantly. The network can handle over 7000 TPS, more than Visa’s peak of 4000 TPS. Nano TPS scales with the size of the network.
- XMR transactions confirm in <2 minutes. XMR can max out at about 1700 TPS, which is much more than what is actually needed. XMR TPS will scale with the capabilities of XMR nodes (mainly network speed).
In the coming years,
- ETH2 with Optimistic Rollups can scale to 100,000 TPS.
- Lightning on BTC will enable millions of TPS.
Again, this is a technology in its infancy. I do not understand the disappointment - Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Replicating the concept of exchange of cash digitally, in a global, decentralized, trustless manner is no small feat. If it works, we free will users of digital currency from the mercy of banks, and give them back their financial privacy.
> XMR transactions confirm in <2 minutes.
> ETH2 with Optimistic Rollups can scale to 100,000 TPS.
Do you have figures for how much compute power they need for those too?
I could write an ACID-compliant DB that could do 1M TPS but if to achieve that I had to buy a gaming rig or two, run it at basically full capacity, then it all sounds less impressive.
> Again, this is a technology in its infancy.
But when will it stop being in its infancy? At what point do we cut our losses and say this approach isn't working (if I may add, a question every scientific experiment should reckon with)?
> I do not understand the disappointment - Rome wasn’t built in a day.
But we move at a faster pace than the Romans now and if a technology hasn't matured after 11 years, then that's reasonable grounds for disappointment don't you think?
NANO uses around 0.112 Wh. Barely any energy at all. At its peak, NANO might consume about as much as energy as a single shopping mall.
XMR is about 60 Gwh. Such is the price of truly anonymous electronic payments, at least until more cryptographers work on XMR to figure out how we can increase efficiency.
Energy consumption is an issue, but it’s overblown. There are trivial things that have a far greater climate impact than crypto, but provide less potential value to humanity. If people spent half as much time worrying about the climate impact of their own choices, our crisis would be all but solved. Finger-pointing is easy, changing yourself is hard.
Still, most cryptos are rapidly moving to reducing their energy consumption by a factor of 100-1000 by moving to proof of stake.
> I could write an ACID-compliant DB that could do 1M TPS
Your system is neither distributed nor trustless. Users will be at your mercy. Hardly the ideal system for humanity.
Try designing a similar system that works across hundreds of thousands of disparate nodes, many of which may be malicious or differently configured and in poor network environments. You will very quickly arrive at a similar model to modern cryptocurrencies.
> At what point do we cut our losses and say this approach isn't working
Certainly not when development speed has been rapidly increasing over time?
These are early stage projects. A few years for a volunteer-designed global electronic financial system that frees humanity from the mercy of banks and financial censorship is not bad.
Especially when you can’t take an Agile “move fast and break things” approach.
> But we move at a faster pace than the Romans now and if a technology hasn't matured after 11 years
Why do you keep saying the technology hasn’t matured after 11 years? I feel like you barely read my reply - how are NANO, XMR, and ETH/ETH2 not massive indicators of the improvement in the crypto sphere? Each alone represents a significant generational stride beyond BTC as it was originally defined. NANO brought us fast transactions, XMR brought us anonymity and censorship resistance, and ETH brought us smart contracts.
That's not a comforting analogy. A shopping mall processes payments that confirm almost instantly too, even on exchange, on top of running lights, security, maybe a movie theater, some music over PA, running escalators, cooking food, etc.
And that's just energy consumption. NANO also has hardware costs that scale linearly with the size of a network.
> XMR is about 60 Gwh...at least until more cryptographers work on XMR to figure out how we can increase efficiency.
Educate me if there's an approach I'm missing here but computing experience so far suggests that there will be little improvement in these figures for a damn long time. As it seems to me, P will have to equal NP before significant strides are made in this domain, at which point of course we've opened a Pandora's box that renders most crypto (not just -currency) insecure.
> There are trivial things that consume far more energy than crypto
Of secondary importance to me but I'm really curious what you think these things are.
> Why do you keep saying the technology hasn’t matured after 11 years?
For the record, you are the first person in our exchange to suggest that this tech is still in its infancy. To quote your previous reply:
> Again, this is a technology in its infancy. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262914]
Actually, in your very post that I am replying to, you say that,
> These are early stage projects.
My point is, they may be massive improvements, generational strides from BTC, but if after 11 years there are still roadblocks to wider rollout (like, as you concede, efficiency), it's just rational to second-guess the approach.
(Footnote: I feel like the purpose of my ACID DB analogy flew over your head. The whole point of it is not to impress but rather to show why raw throughput without specifying the hardware offers little insight. But that's a moot point here.)
A decentralized world financial system with the transaction capacity double that of VISA consuming as much energy as a shopping mall during peak load is perfectly fine. Our current financial system consumes more. It is literally a negligible cost.
> there will be little improvement in these figures for a damn long time
Some preliminary explorations have shown that it may be possible to adopt anonymity on a Nano-like protocol.
Regardless, it won’t be fixed for a long time but that doesn’t matter. I would support Tor if it used 60 Gwh, and so the same go for XMR. Both are essential in guarding people from censorship and authoritarianism.
> Of secondary importance to me but I'm really curious what you think these things are.
In terms of raw environmental impact? The factory farm industry. But, that’s another discussion entirely.
> if after 11 years there are still roadblocks to wider rollout, it's just rational to second-guess the approach.
Designing a decentralized exchange of currency is a hard problem to solve. 11 years doesn’t seem concerning to me with the improvements we have seen in the time span. Especially given that these projects are mostly developed by volunteers.
There are improvements to be made, mainly around usability. But, those can come later, when the networks and protocols have matured.
This has not been true for some years. There's been a lot of ICO money, and some of it is used to pay full time developers.
Every coin launched subsequent to Bitcoin has been a money grab dressed up in heaps of ludicrous marketing lingo, defended by paid-off law firms and celebrity VCs on the take, obscured via technobabble, and powered exclusively by FOMO and greed.
All this shows is that you haven’t spent even 5 minutes trying to understand crypto, and yet you judge it regardless.
- The introduction of true anonymity (as opposed to mere pseudonymity) with XMR has been significant.
- The introduction of rapid, feeless transactions with NANO has been significant.
- The introduction of smart contracts with Ethereum has been significant.
Each of these solutions completely change the crypto sphere and significantly expand its potential use case. Each of these provide something at the protocol layer that Bitcoin does not. And there have been plenty of significant developments beyond these. But bitterness is blinding.
I would be fascinated to hear your evidence for why these are “a money grab dressed up in heaps of ludicrous marketing lingo, defended by paid-off law firms.”
Will it pan out? IDK. But the use case and implementation (For those not aware, a Helium 'miner' is providing a low data rate wireless access point, and you get coins for providing coverage over an area) seem far more feasible from a conceptual standpoint.
If cryptocurrencies are so good at transferring money what's stopping them from replacing existing solutions? Literal billions have been poured in the tech and it still fails to reach any significant adoption outside of get-rich-quick schemes.
In 2017 during the previous bubble I asked people on this forum how long it'd be before cryptocurrencies actually delivered on that mythical "tech" and we'd get actual mainstream real world applications. A couple of people replied that it would take a year or two. Can I get an update on that?