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Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by sanderjd on Sunday December 05, 2021 @10:44AM (#29450072)
Feel free to keep making this criticism of bitcoin, which has no path toward using anything but more and more energy over time. But ethereum's aggregate energy usage is not yet enormous enough to accuse it of roasting the planet, and it is in the final stages of switching to a consensus technology that is not energy inefficient. (And all the newer blockchains have already switched.)
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @11:15AM (#29450327)
If Ethereum had as much use as Bitcoin it would use as much energy--probably more because of the extra processing power required by smart contracts. So this argument reduces to "Ethereum isn't popular so leave it alone", which doesn't make sense because you all are trying to make it popular. None of the PoS networks are popular outside of the crypto space, and almost certainly never will be. Most institutions are busy working on their own, highly centralized coins (e.g. Libra, whatever the PRC's coin is, etc) and aren't gonna adopt one of these anyway, so they're irrelevant. But if they were, they would have the same problems that any PoS network has: rich people control them. How exactly does that improve on the existing system?
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by pa7x1 on Sunday December 05, 2021 @11:54AM (#29450654)
Have you looked at the data before making the claims? Ethereum far surpasses in use Bitcoin by pretty much any metric you look.

For example, in the last 24h Ethereum processed 1.24M of transactions and netted a revenue of $ 60M in transaction fees.

Bitcoin processed 0.24M transactions in the same time period and netted a revenue of $ 0.88M.

Source: messari.io

The transition to PoS cuts the energy consumption by 99.95%, btw.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by mechanical_bear on Sunday December 05, 2021 @12:33PM (#29450954)
Of course they don’t actually consider facts when wielding their hate boners for cryptocurrencies. It’s become tired and predictable every time this topic is brought up. It’s as bad as Religion on Reddit. If they don’t like cryptocurrency, just move on, no one is going to win hearts and minds being the negative jerk about it every time it’s brought.
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @01:31PM (#29451527)
The metric that matters is price, for two reasons:

- Gas fees are based on price

- As price increases it's more attractive to mine. That means devs will increase the mining difficulty. That means more electricity use.

> The transition to PoS cuts the energy consumption by 99.95%, btw.

It also makes Ethereum Visa, so what's the point?

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by pa7x1 on Sunday December 05, 2021 @04:28PM (#29453481)
> Gas fees are based on price

This is not correct. Gas fees are essentially an auction for blockspace, the basefee is adjusted dynamically via EIP-1559 but the tip is essentially an auction (highest bidders go first). If demand outstrips blockspace gas fees go up, independently of ETH price. If supply of blockspace is greater than demand, then gas fees go down irrespectively of ETH price.

EDIT: To clarify. What you say would be the case if gas fees were a set amount of ETH. Then, of course, gas fees denominated in $ would be totally correlated with ETH price. But this is not the case. Gas fees work as explained above and thus are, in principle, decoupled from ETH price. Although some correlation might occur due to market dynamics (bull markets bring network activity, bear markets take away network activity) but is not built-in into the gas price mechanism.

> - As price increases it's more attractive to mine.

This is correct.

> That means devs will increase the mining difficulty.

The mining difficulty adjusts itself, the devs do not need to modify. Same as in Bitcoin, it's designed to adjust to maintain an even block production. You might be thinking of the difficulty bomb that needs to be defused once in a while but it has nothing to do with this topic.

> It also makes Ethereum Visa, so what's the point?

Not following.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by sanderjd on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:02PM (#29454621)
Bitcoin maximalists believe that PoS is definitionally centralized and therefore pointless. This does not make much sense, especially since PoW has always devolved into a small number of large mining pools.
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:34PM (#29455574)
I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist, and I agree with your point about mining pools. I just think PoS is centralization with extra steps with fewer steps than PoW.
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by sanderjd on Sunday December 05, 2021 @11:12PM (#29456047)
I didn't totally mean that you personally are a Bitcoin maximalist, just that this is one of their arguments.

Did you mean extra steps or fewer? Either way, I think it mostly remains to be seen on the centralization question. The newer-fangled PoS chains are certainly more centralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum, but nobody has actually tried distributing tokens broadly through a bunch of years of PoW and only then switching to PoS. It could plausibly end up being quite a bit more decentralized than Bitcoin.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:58PM (#29463206)
> Did you mean extra steps or fewer?

Eh I was trying to be extra clever but, that's practically a synonym for being opaque.

To zoom out a little, I just think these systems have a kind of reverse entropy. Think about all the "decentralized" systems we started off with: email, newsgroups, payments, web apps, State government in the US. They kind of congeal into walled gardens, one and all, and that's probably because frog boiling is very easy (give up an imperceptible amount of control for a hugely perceptible amount of convenience) and the end goal is very profitable.

Like, any company would love to be able to scan every Gmail user's email for ad leads. Holy shit. And we let that happen because of... idk search, anti-spam and storage so large you never have to think about it. Maybe a good deal, honestly, I don't know.

And we're seeing this happen in crypto right? The pitch of literally every crypto service is "simple and you'll get rich". Well this is the same thing: people are giving up imperceptible levels of control for super perceptible levels of convenience. And sure, that's their choice. And we can laugh in people's faces when they get rug pulled saying "not your keys not your crypto" but that's not gonna win us any friends. And we'll be laughing while the blockchains centralize (as they are already doing, right now).

So I think PoW is centralization with extra steps. I think PoS is also centralization with extra steps, but the huge buy-in bakes centralization in right at the beginning, so it's fewer steps than PoW. Crypto was supposed to democratize money and payments! Why is there a $130k entrance fee? And then for those who can't afford that, how many of them will really band together to buy stake shares? How much of that will be a scam? How much of that will be big conglomerates who actually run the nodes, give you your 2% return, but meanwhile they've seized control of the Ethereum network, all while you funded it! So if we're taking crypto's values earnestly, I really do think we have to see PoS as an acceleration towards centralization and a big step backwards.

~~~

I can't even get excited about some potential positive outcomes (PoS happening, energy use declining, centralization also happening, crypto dying, switches to PoS causing schisms, crypto dying, nations banning crypto mining, crypto dying) because so many good, honest people have been hoodwinked into this bonkers scheme and they'll lose so, so much money.

And honestly, for what? So banks can't stop you from making an ACH transfer for weed? Seriously, just get out there and vote already.

~~~

Broadly I think this a problem with the fundamental libertarian underpinnings of blockchain currencies. They sort of presuppose that everyone starts from the same place, and then you're rewarded in line with what you contribute to the network. But in the world we live in, there's huge inequality--we absolutely do not start from the same place. So unless your protocol has some mechanism to even things out, it'll just reproduce that inequality.

And that inequality has a lot of second order effects. Rich people can buy a lot of mining or a lot of stake. They can afford to start businesses like exchanges or crypto news websites (or buy them after they get popular). They can afford to buy ads pumping their coin, or astroturf campaigns against changes they don't like. They can build services on the chain and collect rent. Same as it ever was.

There's this whole conundrum in progressive politics about why some people so consistently vote against their own self interest. There's a lot of reasons, but one I thought was just absolutely wrong was "well, everyone thinks they'll be rich someday"--so they vote against taxes and regulation and such. But that is 100% the dynamic in crypto right now. I honestly don't see any positive outcome from any of this, I really don't.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by sanderjd on Monday December 06, 2021 @07:01PM (#29467487)
This is an interesting comment, thanks!

Just to say one thing: something I like about PoS is that it forces validators to keep skin in the game. If validators do anything that screws with the legitimacy of the protocol (like big validators getting together to collude on some nefarious action) then that will affect the value of the asset that they are forced to hold in order to be a validator. So they have an incentive to run the network in the way users expect.

FWIW: there is a good (in my view) decentralized staking protocol called RocketPool just launched, which I hope will be popular among those who don't have $130k.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @01:15PM (#29476108)
Yeah, that is a big difference between PoS vs. PoW where damaging the network damages you a lot more financially. You can cash out PoW earnings more or less immediately and then corrupt the network, whereas with PoS your stake is what lets you corrupt it. Someone else linked a thread that was like, "the buy-in for PoW is pretty high too, you gotta burn $15k-$25k on an ASIC mining rig...", but that's obviously peanuts compared to $130k.

I'm not so sure it's a given that corrupting the network outright destroys it though. That defense mechanism assumes at least a few things:

- Enough people would notice

- Enough of those people would sell their ETH as a result

- Enough of those people would sell enough of their ETH

I think it's pretty plausible some off-chain action would occur instead, like a fork or some governance issue. It seems unlikely that the majority of ETH holders would participate in a mass sell-off that would bankrupt many (most?) of them, to say nothing of the social (my whole life is ETH) and investment (my whole business and the businesses/careers of all my friends are ETH) costs.

You could also imagine a conglomerate doing this for "noble" reasons. "We reversed transaction Y because they're child pornographers" or whatever the worst thing is in the crypto community (maybe they discover Hillary Clinton's wallet address or something). This could be enough grey area for most people to not pull a run on ETH.

---

(Sorry hit Submit by accident, if you can believe it)

Rocket Pool looks, idk it makes me nervous. From a quick read (could be getting this wrong) they're essentially selling their tokens for ETH, but you can't redeem your tokens to get your ETH back unless the staking pool can cover it, which I think they currently can't because the Beacon chain isn't sending ETH rewards yet. So you spend fiat for ETH, and you spend ETH for an IOU.

I guess my preference here would be something like a straightforward DAO where people buy shares of a staking operation and there some kind of governance when they want to leave. Anything more complicated than that and my spider sense starts tingling.

But as a broader comment, one of the things that makes me (and probably others) suspicious about the crypto space is that it's just littered with small and large reminders of how rich you're gonna get. Like the docs about their rETH token is a green graph going up tremendously with an example of how you're gonna make a 25% profit [1]. Like, I'm not saying all examples should include a losing money case and all graphs should be red lines going south, but there are real MLM vibes everywhere you look.

[1]: https://docs.rocketpool.net/guides/staking/overview.html#the...

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:47PM (#29455609)
Gas fees are gwei, which is ETH, which has a varying price relative to fiat. Isn't that true? I might be misunderstanding.

Also I didn't know the network would automatically set the difficulty, but yeah good to know.

PoS centralizes to the rich, which is the existing payments system, e.g. Visa.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by pa7x1 on Monday December 06, 2021 @03:37AM (#29457560)
Gas fees are denominated in GWei but they are not fixed in a set amount of GWei. What you are implying is like saying that because someone paid 3903 ETH for a Banksy painting [0], then when ETH price goes up the price of the Banksy goes up. We don't think of it this way, right? We think the Banksy has a worth set independently of the price of ETH even if it was sold for certain amount denominated in ETH. Same thing happens with blockspace (the resource sold by the Ethereum network), it's paid in ETH but its worth is whatever the market is willing to pay for it, ETH is just a unit of account. In particular, if you want to do a transfer to pay for a coffee and the gas prices of the last few blocks would mean you would pay more than the coffee is worth, you wouldn't make the transaction, right? So you are priced out of the network because you are implicitly thinking of the worth of your transaction in USD terms and the transaction fees in USD terms. Most people think like you, they have a value they are willing to pay for the network fees and thus the market as a whole finds a value for the available blockspace.

PoS is not more centralizing than PoW. I explained this in detail in another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29390152

Feel free to counter the points made there.

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/11/19/banksy-painting...

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:05PM (#29462376)
Yeah, to distill what you're saying (lmk if I'm still misunderstanding), GWei is ETH, but looking at it relative to USD (or whatever fiat) is wrong. That's where I disagree, because electricity and equipment is denominated in fiat, and the whole system is an electricity/equipment (in fiat) -> ETH conversion system, so the relative price of ETH to fiat is beyond relevant, it's the whole idea. No one would do this if ETH were worth less than the fiat needed to make it (promise of future worth aside).

And yeah, I do think probably most people still think in fiat, so if you kind of elide all of the ETH/GWei steps and say:

> Hey, buy a mining rig for $2k, you'll make $60/day after electricity costs, you'll make your investment back in a month and after that it's pure profit

That's all people care about, and rightly so. If, on the other hand you say:

> Hey, buy a mining rig for $2k, you'll lose $10/day after electricity costs... that's it

That's not super appetizing right. And the only way the system makes fiat is if ETH is worth fiat. You can't abstract it out of the system, it's the only reason the system is relevant at all.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:19PM (#29454736)
> It also makes Ethereum Visa, so what's the point?

If Visa could be shared by anyone (without restriction) that is willing to stake capital into it, if it took at least 66% of the shares to try to collude, if it managed to do it at a fraction of the cost of the existing financial infrastructure, if it were uncensorable by governments and if it continues to be permissionless... then Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:39PM (#29454877)
If we could maybe keep our discussion to one thread that would be helpful.

Meta aside, you described the stock market. You don't even need 66%, just a big percentage of shareholders (there are efforts to do this with big evil companies like Exxon).

Uncensorable is a pipe dream, crypto isn't beyond the reach of governments, as China's mining ban has demonstrated. And you're wildly mischaracterizing the costs of the existing payment systems vs crypto; maybe you think there wouldn't be all the ancillary bureaucracies and services, but that's literally all the exchanges and such are so you'd already be wrong.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Sunday December 05, 2021 @08:04PM (#29455026)
> You don't even need 66%, just a big percentage of shareholders

Unlike most companies in the stock market, the fact that Ethereum has a low point of entry leads to two things happening:

- The sheer amount of people needed to be involved in collusion would make such an attack practically impossible.

- The chance of such an attack being profitable is so low to make it economically unattractive. An attack of the network would lead to a loss of the value of Ethereum itself, so unless those in collusion have other assets on the chain that are more valuable than the staked Ethereum itself, it will end up being net negative.

> Uncensorable is a pipe dream (...) China's mining ban has demonstrated.

China may ban mining as much as they want, this is not the uncensorable part I am talking about. What I am talking about is that there is no single entity that can stop you from making transactions on the blockchain. Even if someone is deemed "subversive" in China and gets denied a service by the social credit system, they can still have access to the blockchain, buy, sell and use services.

We don't need even need to talk about China. Just think of all the people who had problems with Paypal and had their funds frozen with no recourse. Think of all the people that live in countries with strict capital controls and can not move their money if they want to. This is what I mean by "uncensorable".

> you're wildly mischaracterizing the costs of the existing payment systems vs crypto

Currently, it costs more (a lot more) to make even simple transfers on the blockchain, but as the technology scales and new solutions come up, these will go down. There will also be insurance, fraud-detecting and even conflict-resolution [0] systems based on the blockchain, so at one point the UX will be just as good as swiping a credit card.

[0]: https://kleros.io

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @11:28PM (#29456164)
People think Sybil is hard, and it is, but mining groups make it a lot easier. Usually the rejoinder is "Sybil requires a huge investment and immediately destroys it" but that's probably not how it would go. A miner consortium would selectively Sybil, and everyone with all their money wrapped up in BTC would probably just be like "well, that still seems preferable to losing all our money in a crash to zero" and keep their BTC anyway.

As far as censoring or control or whatever, sure there are institutions that can do this (and have): governments and banks. All they have to do is ban crypto just like they ban buying anything else. It's so, so super easy.

---

Ok so, to be a little less antagonistic, I also think banks are junk and buying things should be private, etc. I think those things are a little at odds with preventing things like the drug trade and modern slavery, but I don't think the financial system is the place to attack them.

Broadly I just don't think blockchains are necessary for payments, privacy, distributed computing, you name it. Literally everything anyone can "imagine" (insurance, fraud detection, oooooh) already exists and works great.

Maybe it's corny but, I think these problems are best solved by functioning democracies. Elect people who think bank regulation is important, etc. Erecting a shadow financial system based on blockchains seems about the worst way to it.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Monday December 06, 2021 @02:07AM (#29457031)
You really are out of reasonable arguments, yet you continue to argue:

- Please continue to talk about PoW as a strawman for blockchain in general.

- "Governments and banks can just ban crypto" is beyond missing the point. The more "banks and governments" try to shut it out and stop people from using it, the more people will be marginalized and get to the point where crypto will be their only choice. Black markets thrive in authoritarian societies, not free ones.

- The world does not care about what you think. "Oh, you can solve that with functioning democracies!" No shit, genius, what a revelation. Now go tell that to the people in Venezuela who can not run a fucking grocery stand without the government telling them they are not allowed to take a profit, and tell the others that it is okay to starve to death or being forced to flee to Colombia because "blockchain is burning the planet".

---

Just like 99% of the "critics", you don't know what you are talking about you and you project your totalitarian tendencies onto others, while having this childish arrogance of claiming to have a monopoly on what is moral and just.

At least now I am certain that it is just a waste of time to discuss with you.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:12PM (#29462479)
Oh I started to reply to this post in earnest, but discovered it devolved into a bunch of insults. Super disappointed.
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Sunday December 05, 2021 @05:41PM (#29454084)
Ethereum already has more transactions than bitcoin and consistently moves more value around than BTC.

If you think that "Ethereum isn't popular", please explain why so many people are complaining about network congestion and network fees.

The "extra smart contracts" do not take processing power. The problem for scaling blockchains is on blockspace and network synchonization. It is I/O bound, not CPU bound.

Ethereum validators will not consume a lot more power based on its usage, and currently the energy consumption of eth validators is 10000x smaller than of the energy of consoles playing videogames.

You really don't know what you are talking about, but you will be too proud to admit it.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:19PM (#29454742)
As I said in a sibling comment, the important metric is price, because of gas fees and mining profit incentives. Price goes up, more miners start up, difficulty increases, more carbon burned, Earth dead.

Also I/O here means adding a block, which is proc-bound, which roasts the planet.

Finally, video games have entertainment utility. Cryptocurrencies have no non-crime utility. It's not useful to compare the energy use of things that have utility to things that don't.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:24PM (#29454778)
Your sibling point about mining is a strawman against PoS, already responded.

As for "utility": You don't get to decide what is the utility and the value of what people do on the blockchain, just like we don't get to decide what is the value of playing GTA V or Minecraft.

Again, you are just wrong but too proud to admit it.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by sanderjd on Sunday December 05, 2021 @06:58PM (#29454604)
PoS clearly improves on the energy usage situation, which was the criticism of the comment I replied to. The other criticisms of PoS are out of scope for the specific criticism I was responding to.

I believe current PoW ethereum actually runs more transactions than the bitcoin chain, but I am not defending its energy usage. If it doesn't ever manage the switch to PoS then it will deserve the same criticism with respect to energy usage.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by jallen_dot_dev on Sunday December 05, 2021 @12:26PM (#29450902)
The energy used by Ethereum has nothing to do with contracts, it's all in the PoW. The reason it uses less energy than Bitcoin is because the block reward[1] per unit of difficulty is less. That's the real determinant for energy used, the more money you can earn for mining a block the more you can afford to throw at the task of mining it.

The block reward is only loosely related to popularity, in that more transactions trying to get into blocks will increase fees and demand for ETH will increase price. But as the sibling comment already pointed out Ethereum is more "popular" than Bitcoin by many counts.

[1] reward being: (block subsidy + fees) * price

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @12:59PM (#29451195)
> The energy used by Ethereum has nothing to do with contracts, it's all in the PoW.

Processing smart contracts requires processing power, which requires energy.

> the block reward[1] per unit of difficulty is less. That's the real determinant for energy used

Doesn't this go out the window as ETH's price goes up? Also EthHash requires a lot more energy than Bitcoin's SHA-256 (this [1] says SHA-256 is in the Th/s where the latest EthHash ASIC is in the Gh/s), so if the dinosaur BTC dies and ETH takes its rightful place, aren't things much worse?

[1]: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2019/06/15/mining-algorithms-proo...

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by jallen_dot_dev on Sunday December 05, 2021 @01:26PM (#29451471)
> Processing smart contracts requires processing power, which requires energy.

My point is the energy used to process smart contracts is so small compared to the energy used to find a low block hash, it rounds to 0. Also, if we're comparing to Bitcoin, then by that same token Bitcoin also requires energy to process its "smart contracts" (ScriptPubKey/ScriptSig scripts, which are just small programs). There is nothing special about contracts in Ethereum.

> Also EthHash requires a lot more energy than Bitcoin's SHA-256

More energy to perform 1 hash. But what does it matter how many hashes are performed? What matters is how much energy is used to perform those hashes. If you made the hashing algorithm 10x more efficient you would have 10x more hashes, not 10x less energy spent hashing on the network.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @01:41PM (#29451633)
Yeah I mean, re: smart contracts you can interpret it in 2 ways: 1 other energy usages are so high it's zero, or 2 it's an extremely expensive way to run a distributed program. Either way is bad.

Re: hash difficulty, this is a function of the network right, so as ETH mining capacity goes up, difficulty has to go up, increasing energy usage. Everyone's answer to this is "PoS!", but PoS is essentially centralization to the rich.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by jallen_dot_dev on Sunday December 05, 2021 @02:29PM (#29452196)
Right, but you don't have to be rich to participate in PoS. You can stake a small amount in a pool. Just like you don't have to be rich to create a giant mining farm, you can join a mining pool with 1 miner. Actually I think PoS might be more egalitarian than PoW. Even if you can scrape together enough money to buy 1 miner, if you don't have access to cheap electricity you just don't mine. Whereas you can always stake with a small amount regardless of where you are in the world.
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @03:00PM (#29452523)
Sure, this is just pooling your resources; the front page of Ethereum's PoS site gives this as an option if you don't have 32ETH. But this is like millennials pooling their resources to buy a house, except in that case you get a house. What do we get if we pool together to run an Ethereum node? The ability to run a slower payment system than the one we already have? The ability to launder money simply and effectively?
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:50PM (#29454948)
Those staking ETH are rewarded with 2%/year, so they are all having some form of savings account.

What else does it let you do?

- To make transactions with anyone in the world without being blocked by a bank or a financial institution.

- To put your resources to use without having limits. If you have a bicycle, you will be able to join a distributed bike-sharing program, fully insured. You will be able to finance micro-credit programs for people in countries without having to go through tons of red-tape or corrupt middlemen.

- you will be able to be fully sovereign over your online identity(ies). Think of how easy it is to switch between server hosting providers. As long as you control the domain name, you are not forced to stay with a vendor you don't like. With blockchain identities, you will be able to do the same with service you use.

The only thing you are showing with your pseudo-criticism is that you are in quite a privileged position if you are okay with the status quo, and also you have no imagination.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Sunday December 05, 2021 @10:17PM (#29455749)
2%/yr is junk, even CDs are better than that. The rest of your post is crypto naïveté. I'll believe the rest when I see it, because the current crypto landscape is essentially all scams and speculation, with again no utility whatsoever.
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by sanderjd on Sunday December 05, 2021 @11:12PM (#29456058)
Could you point me to a CD at 2% right now?
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:19PM (#29462582)
Wow they're so bad! OK I'll eat it on this one, I'm out of date. But like, there are lots of safer investments that get you > 2%.
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by sanderjd on Monday December 06, 2021 @07:07PM (#29467525)
It really depends on what you view as safe! I agree that 2% seems really low for locking money into a risky asset. But the fact is that everything with more yield than that right now has an unknown level of risk attached to it. Here's an interesting podcast from today that essentially argues for just holding cash right now: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-06/richard-b...
Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @02:04PM (#29476785)
Oh yeah totally I mean, one of the first bonkers things I learned about money is that its value changes and there's nowhere you can put it where it doesn't evaporate (devalue from inflation) where it might not instantly disappear (crash). Everything is a balance. But like, for locking up $130k in a wildly volatile market, I'd expect way more than 2%. That's way out of balance. Like, there are no reasonable (sure there are some bond ETFs or the one ESG ETF under 2%) Vanguard ETFs below that, and the ones you'd invest in are at worst 8%, none of which are anywhere near the risk or volatility of ETH.

So to me, the 2% doesn't seem like an incentive. But I don't think it was designed that way? I thought it was to make the rewards more equitable, and also continue to keep validator skin in the game (why would you corrupt Ethereum, you get paid in ETH). I don't know if it really succeeds at these things; I think rich people can stake multiple times and the initial big miner investment are probably sufficient skin (plus like, are people committed to ETH because of their mining rigs or because of the gains?), but that's just conjecture, hard (impossible?) to know for sure.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @07:34AM (#29483966)
You are not locking $130K, you are locking 32ETH.

> people committed to ETH because of their mining rigs or because of the gains?

ETH is not to be priced like a stock. ETH is to be priced like a non-renewable commodity like oil. If the network is not efficient, people will move away from it, demand for ETH goes down and so does its price. People staking ETH are betting that the network utility will grow and the demand for ETH will grow as well.

> I think rich people can stake multiple times

If you think it is a bad allocation of the capital, why would you think that people with lots of it would put so much into stake?

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @10:54AM (#29486249)
> You are not locking $130K, you are locking 32ETH.

OK I mean, my point is in whatever fiat you want to pick, 32 ETH is a lot.

> ETH is not to be priced like a stock. ETH is to be priced like a non-renewable commodity like oil.

I don't know if ETH is like oil; when we run out of oil we legit run out, like it's gone. We can run out of blocks on Ethereum, but ETH sticks around "forever".

As a result, I think the stock comparison is actually more accurate. Shares are divisible, their value relative to fiat fluctuates, they're transferable, etc. Or I mean, we could also view it as a currency. I just don't think it's a commodity at all, especially because it doesn't have physical utility. Every other commodity (like oil as you point out, or orange juice or cotton or copper) has physical utility. ETH doesn't.

> If the network is not efficient, people will move away from it, demand for ETH goes down and so does its price.

Well idk, the network is pretty inefficient right now. Buterin just posted "Endgame" where the main theme is basically "we'll get the transaction rate up". Relative to centralized transaction rates, Ethereum is very slow.

And there are networks with faster transactions rates! And yet Ethereum remains popular. I think a lot of crypto advocates get caught up in the actual attributes of a network but then can't explain why clearly inferior networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are super popular. Well, it's because they're worth a lot of fiat--very few people care about the nitty gritty of blockchains, they just want to get rich. So I don't think "people will move away from it" as long as the fiat price is high.

And this just kind of torpedoes crypto optimism right? We have these networks that clearly solve a lot of problems that Bitcoin and Ethereum have, but it turns out the path to success and popularity is to make your coin as casino-like as possible. I think that's a compelling reason to be pessimistic, not optimistic.

> People staking ETH are betting that the network utility will grow and the demand for ETH will grow as well.

Yeah I mean, "bet" is the apt word here.

>> I think rich people can stake multiple times

> If you think it is a bad allocation of the capital, why would you think that people with lots of it would put so much into stake?

I think the reasons other people would are legion:

- I'm rich and I'm bored/interested

- I understand the technology and I think we'll overcome the risks and downsides

- As a libertarian I super hate liberal democracy and any kind of gatekeeping, and I'm willing to take some pretty drastic, risky actions to subvert its financial system

- I believe a lot of people are disillusioned by capitalist economies and that will drive adoption of alternative economies and currencies

FWIW I am in the 4th camp. I just think subverting financial systems set up by democracies is deeply immoral so I can't bring myself to profit off of it. Also I don't have 32 ETH to throw around haha.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @12:43PM (#29487857)
> 32 ETH is a lot.

The point is that the staking contracts were set at 32 ETH since the time when ETH was about $100. There is a good amount of people that staked then when it was a lot easier, and today there is always the possibility of staking pools (just like there are mining pools)

> ETH sticks around "forever".

Not since July, when the EIP-1159 introduced gas fee burn. There has been since then a lot of blocks were more ETH was burned with the gas then generated as miner rewards, so ETH can be

> network is pretty inefficient right now. (...) And there are networks with faster transactions rates!

The mistake you are making is that - like the $130k comment above - you are thinking in terms of a static system. Ethereum is constant development precisely as a way to address the bottlenecks that are being hit.

There are already people using Layer-2 systems for making transfers and for decentralized exchanges. This year we also are starting to see more complete scaling solutions. The more Layer-2 solutions come up, the less important the base-layer performance becomes for users.

Talking about the base-layer when it has been widely established that Ethereum is heading to the direction of scaling through roll-ups and other layer-2 systems is either ignorance or intellectual dishonesty.

> "bet" is the apt word here.

Pretty much in the same way that people "invest" in Uber or other Unicorns even if they go years without turning a profit, people "invest" in Ethereum (or Bitcoin, or Cardano, or Solana, or whatever) because they expect that in the future that network will be useful. It is a bet that it will be more profitable and create wealth in the future.

> I think the reasons other people would are legion:

You misunderstood my question. You were criticizing PoS because you claimed that it wasn´t capital efficient (2"% is not much..."), at the same time you pointing out the "issue" that "rich people" could put more at stake than others. These criticisms are at odds with one another.

> I just think subverting financial systems set up by democracies is deeply immoral

Not only you are clearly mistaking opinions for facts; this single statement seems to be based on a worldview that:

- assumes that "financial systems" were "set up" by democracies.

- assumes that being a "liberal democracy" is a binary property.

- assumes that leaders and elites from the "liberal democracies" are actually working with the interests of people at heart.

- assumes that "liberal democracies" are the inevitable endgame for government.

- assumes that people working with decentralization are only concerned about "finance".

- is based on a false dichotomy of "full-anarchy" vs "globalized world subject to a set of universal values as defined by liberal democracies"

> so I can't bring myself to profit off of it.

Do you own any stock? Pension funds? a 401-k? Worked for any VC-funded company? Bought anything made in China even though you knew there was an alternative product made in $wherever_you_live?

Then yes, you are profiting off of it. So please just get off the high horse.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by camgunz on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @05:06PM (#29491182)
>> 32 ETH is a lot.

> The point is that the staking contracts were set at 32 ETH since the time when ETH was about $100.

That's not relevant because they're still in the category of "people who have $130k to stake". Kind of doesn't matter how you came about it.

>> ETH sticks around "forever".

> Not since July, when the EIP-1159 introduced gas fee burn.

Oh cool I didn't know that. I guess this is to avoid the money laundering via gas fees thing--your ETH gets black holed instead?

Again I don't know that it's that relevant though. With oil--again your example--you only get utility out of it by destroying it. It's not like I have to burn ETH to light a lamp, destroying that ETH forever. So I still think it's less like an expendable, finite resource and more like a currency or a security.

But all that said, Ethereum users don't want Ether to all get burned, right? I assume what everything thinks will happen is that the increasing scarcity increases the value of unburned ETH, so that even if there's 1 ETH left it's still worth $50 gazillion or whatever and we just trade fractions of it. So also not like oil, because it would be pretty weird if every time I burned a teaspoon of it every other barrel of oil became more... flammable?

>> network is pretty inefficient right now. (...) And there are networks with faster transactions rates!

> The mistake you are making is that - like the $130k comment above - you are thinking in terms of a static system. Ethereum is constant development precisely as a way to address the bottlenecks that are being hit.

> There are already people using Layer-2 systems for making transfers and for decentralized exchanges. This year we also are starting to see more complete scaling solutions. The more Layer-2 solutions come up, the less important the base-layer performance becomes for users.

Layer-2 is an MEV-generating machine, and there's no way around it. It's fundamental because L2 is a desync from the chain. It doesn't really matter for dApps, and maybe it's tolerable for payments and such too, but we're stacking a lot of caveats on "send money to anyone anywhere at any time (also pay gas fees also they have to get a wallet also you'll get MEV'd). Plus, how is this not just middlemen (miners, banks) running yet more rent-seeking operations on yet another payment system?

And we're not even talking about all the different incompatibilities between different L2 solutions.

> Talking about the base-layer when it has been widely established that Ethereum is heading to the direction of scaling through roll-ups and other layer-2 systems is either ignorance or intellectual dishonesty.

There's a third option you should consider carefully: that you're wrong and someone's trying to politely point it out to you. You're super closed-minded about this stuff, and I think you'd benefit from a little introspection as to why. You and I are just a couple of naive humans stumbling ignorantly through an infinite darkness. We know almost nothing and are almost always wrong about everything. The only reason I know anything about crypto is I assumed I was wrong about it and read a bunch. I'm just representing what I think; I'm not astroturfing; I'm not talking my own book. I'm not saying I'm not ignorant; I am! But it's possible I'm not as ignorant as you think I am.

> <democracy stuff>

Look I'm no strong defender of the current state of democracy, and I'm pretty anti-capitalist. I just don't think blockchains are good solutions to governmental problems (or, good solutions to any problem tbh). If you want to argue that blockchains return power to people and are decentralized, you have to answer for multiple successful 51% attacks and Ethereum in particular hard forking the chain for political/financial reasons.

> Do you own any stock? Pension funds? a 401-k? Worked for any VC-funded company? Bought anything made in China even though you knew there was an alternative product made in $wherever_you_live?

> Then yes, you are profiting off of it. So please just get off the high horse.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. That said, there's a difference between incidental consumption and direct exploitation and subversion. Maybe it seems like I'm high-roading you, but I don't think capitalist consumption gives us ethical carte blanche. "Hey I know I scammed millions of people but, I had a 401k and you know what they say, in for a penny in for a pound". Yeah, that rings false.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @07:24PM (#29492399)
(I started writing this, but I realized that you are not going to change your mind no matter what new information gets presented to you. So do whatever you want with it)

The whole thing about "L2 is a MEV-generating machine". Fucking hell, dude. If someone tells you (like I did in another thread) that you can not make an international transaction without losing at least 7% of the value, and that I already have made and received payments on layer-2 systems for fractions of a cent, what is so hard to acknowledge that the people doing it are not idiots?

Setup costs are one-off and independent of the value you are transferring off-chain. They are amortized through all the lifetime of your "account" and the transactions you made.

Paypal does not work like that. Credit cards do not work like that. Loopring does. Zksync does. Even if all these systems did was to make transfers of stabletokens from A to B, they would be already miles ahead of the status quo.

Yes, there are still "middlemen", but they are both (a) cheaper compared with existing methods and (b) part of a global market with no monopoly. Almost all of the tech that is being adopted is open-source, so there is no large competitive advantage that one can establish over the other. If a roll-up starts trying to jack up fees, others can basically make a clone and take all of the userbase overnight.

Re:Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum... by rglullis on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @07:22PM (#29492384)
> The only reason I know anything about crypto is I assumed I was wrong about it and read a bunch.

You know what is so grating about this conversation?

Every comment you wrote shows your knowledge is incomplete and based on only what you heard/read, and yet you talk like you know all the theory and therefore you can prove how it doesn't work in practice. When presented with new information that shows how you are wrong, you double down on your theoretical background instead of looking at what people empirically achieved.

You end up sounding like someone who studied a bit of aerodynamics and then goes to believe they can teach birds how to fly. Or worse, you see a beetle flying in your face and start claiming "this is physically impossible, it's not real!"

Please, don't be those people who can not do anything useful with their life and end up just shitting or doubting on the works of others.