Re:Vitalik Buterin is worried about crypto's future
by mwattsun on Monday March 21, 2022 @01:49PM
(#30757366)
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.
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.
With this analogy, the database component would map to the blockchain : https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_chain_full_sync_data...
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) )
video of the pixels evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY
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.