I don't think urbit is all that great, either, but this is coming from someone who decided to increase their investment in face to face conversations following social media starting to crumble.
Ethereum operates perfectly smoothly, with zero downtime since launching 8 years ago. In any case, besides peripheral features like NFT-gated forums and Ethereum Name Service created proxy bames, this doesn't use Ethereum's distributed network. Just the public key wallet software built for using Ethereum.
[1] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt [2] https://urbit.org/overview/people-history
Where on the website do you see this?
This is very outdated and Tlon no longer operates/runs urbit.org but, in any case, the ToS says this: "The Site is owned and operated by Tlon", so the reference was to the website "urbit.org", not the Urbit project.
It’s just like a “free to play” game that will upsell you on in-app purchases at every opportunity. I can’t imagine anyone wants their reading experience to be more like that.
“Web3” really just means “the worst upsell shit from mobile gaming, in every aspect of your life — with the extra bonus that you get to risk losing your money on a scammy crypto exchange!”
But far be it for someone to store their private keys in a wallet and sign transactions on their own behalf! Nooooo, that has no real applications!
Is there anything more anonymous and less dependent on 3rd parties than "hi, welcome, please create a new user ID and password"?
Everything else, as far as I can see, ends up benefiting the provider in some sneaky shady way,as opposed to user.
Ethereum accounts are not tied to any service. They are just a public/private keypair so they can be used as portable usernames.
Meanwhile, Mr. John "bro trust me bro your wallets secure bro nobody's going to just drop a viral token into your wallet to fuck with you bro" Ethereum is a 3rd party to the transaction between me and a website. I trust Ashley Madison with my password more than I trust the Web3 ecosystem and cryptobros to not fuck me over using the rules of their own rigged game.
"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant."
On the other hand, with the Ethereum protocol, you only have to rely on the public blockchain to attest/sign/prove ownership. You can choose the software and hardware that you use to secure your wallet too. You can even keep that wallet airgapped, totally offline and still authenticate using QR codes. If you were so inclined you could even run your own end point/node so you're not relying on any 3rd parties to attest/sign for you. It's a self sovereign online identity if you want it to be. It also has other benefits like the ability to store monetary value in the way of cryptocurrencies.
The ability to verify ownership of digital assets (tokens), like NFTs, and use those in creative ways like we have here. You can also use the Ethereum Name Service and tie a .ETH domain name to your public key, so people know that a message sent by frizlab.eth is really you, even if you have to get a new wallet address. It's your identity (frizlab.eth), your wallet, and with NFT's I think it could also verify and visualize your reputation or skillset online too, no matter what website you're on. Your identity owned by you and built on top of a world wide, immutable, distributed, consensus protocol. I wrote an article for Wordpress developers with my ideas, but I think it can apply to the web as a whole.
https://caches.xyz/the-rostrum/wordpress-web3-and-ethereum-w...
Again I haven't used this service and have no affiliation with them but do believe that we desperately need truly public digital infrastructure and I think Ethereum is a step in that direction.
Basically the difference is that the username and password can be used to authenticate with that specific site and that’s it, while a “wallet” browser extension or app can let the user sign transactions and manage value outside your site, so they don’t have to trust your site (they approve all major transactions) and your site can’t impersonate them. You may think you won’t but one of your devs could go in for example and salami-slice the balances of your members, or change all the votes in a stackoverflow election etc.
With the Ethereum approach, you can control this data about yourself. For example, with zero-knowledge proofs you could prove to a service that "I am over 18 and an US resident with a valid phone number" without sending any actual information about yourself to that party. Twitter shouldn't need your phone number. It just needs to know that you have one.
Logging in with your Google account everywhere is convenient because it contains all kinds of facts about you. But you have no control over what's done with that data, either by Google or the service you're logging into. With "Log in wit Ethereum" you could get the same conveniences, but you still own your data and have full control over what's being done with it or who can access which parts of it.
You do not need Ethereum for auth. You do not even need Ethereum for anonymous without a 3rd party provider.
I do not see what value this actually provides nor why it should come in this form. So I believe it is a reasonable assumption that it is in this form so the creators can get in on the scam-o-sphere that is Ethereum/NFT.
I get you have an axe to grind but it would be better in a thread about Ethereum tech rather than an application. You are being really annoying and against the spirit of HN.
I'm sorry you find my comments annoying; at least find solace in the mutuality of it.
Besides the only immutable planet-scale consensus of history, of course.
Good grief.
"Very good", take off.
If you know of any alternative proposals for creating an incentive structure to store an unadulterated log of...whatever it may be that random humans may want to share with future humans, please share.
It seems like a valuable goal.
What's more likely?
You convince the Internet connected world not to adopt a proof of consensus mechanism via HN comment and related butterfly effects,
or something just like the posted app/service not only exists but thrives in under 5 years?
Now I know for certain we can call it here.
Sorry we didn't get further, reader.
Try over three orders of magnitude.
The old Ethereum chain consumed 78 TWh per year. The new Ethereum chain consumes 0.0026 TWh per year.
For context, YouTube runs on 12 TWh per year. So the old Ethereum consumed the power of 6.5 YouTubes, and currently YouTube consumes the power of 4,615 new Ethereums.
So you really can't be more wrong about Ethereum still being "extremely electricity-intensive". It's just disinformation at this point.
So, having now established that people who don't care also don't have good sources, let's get back to you, somebody who does actually care. Do you have any sources? If not, why not? "Crypto has rotted my brain" is an acceptable answer, fyi.
* Sync a copy of the Ethereum blockchain. It should be pretty straightforward to tell if you have a good copy, because that's like, blockchain's whole "thing".
* Pick out the "difficulty" field in the last proof-of-work block header, then divide it into the hashrate and power consumption of typical mining hardware at the time. This gives you the "before" consumption figure.
* Pick out the total number of validators in the latest proof-of-stake block header. Remove validators that share withdrawal addresses, as they are run by the same entity and likely all run on a single piece of hardware (or few).
* Multiply that number of validators by the typical hardware power consumption of an i5 desktop computer with an SSD, which is likely what most of them are running on.
I'll leave that as an exercise for you to not do.
> That any amount of electricity is being consumed or any amount of e-waste is being generated for the the gambling hobby horse of a small handful of already wealthy individuals is pretty fucking stupid imo.
You must hate AAA gaming, then. Same wealthy people, same e-waste being created purely to shuffle pixels around and keep them from being bored. Crypto brought you and me together in this thread, and I'm sure you can agree that we're both entertained, right?
Your understanding is imperfect. You use your private key on Ethereum to authenticate, not an NFT. It does seem like certain NFTs gate access to different parts of the site.
> NFTs are still wildly damaging to the ecosystem, with how much electricity they demand
Not really anymore. As others have pointed out, the switch to PoS massively reduced Ethereum's energy demands, by ~99.5%. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/26/ethereums-lifetime-...
> Their sole purpose is to be traded as chits in a series of wealth extractions, until some unfortunate sucker is left holding the bag on a worthless blob of data that (rightfully) nobody wants.
Ya, unfortunately the space is rife with grifters and hype in weird places, but that doesn't seem relevant to this specific project though.
> So I believe it is a reasonable assumption that it is in this form so the creators can get in on the scam-o-sphere that is Ethereum/NFT.
Or they're trying to make something legit within this space. The Internet's early use cases were largely a bunch of scams and over-hyped projects that failed miserably. That didn't exactly hold for long though.
Not all NFTs need to be bought or sold. They can just as easily be used as membership tokens that are given away.
Also, according to the website, only some of the communities will be locked behind NFTs. Others appear to be free to join just with an Ethereum account used as auth.
I haven't used the service so I'm not going to defend it but it makes sense for web3 communities to base their auth around the tech they're already using, and that is crypto wallets. Everyone in the community already has crypto wallets so the friction to join is very low.
Also, with the move to proof-of-stake, the winner-takes-all-ness of it is even worse. It is now even easier for early movers to continue reaping marginal rewards. It is a system designed to entrench and centralize power.
This is also a flaw shared by the actual real world economy used by big girls and boys. However, crypto has also innovated many many more flaws and insecurities. So I'd rather stick to the bad system we have now, vs the worse system designed by grifters who quite literally just do not understand fucking anything about sensible ways to organize people.
If you’re talking about the gas fees, that’s the pricing market at work, similar to toll fees for cars for highways. Layer 2s would be the train or megabuses on those highways - amortized gas costs by the number of people on them.
PoS ensures marginal rewards to everyone equally with the same percentage unlike Bitcoin. You either bought ETH at $8 a pop back in 2017, or you’re now buying it at $1850.
Taking time out of my day to give grief to crypto enthusiasts is just a public service. No need to thank me.
I honestly think it's kind of pathetic for you to come in and crap on things that bring other people joy, just because you personally don't like it, or you just inherently hate people who enjoy gambling or something.
If it's proof enough, I've personally run both the energy-heavy PoW mining software and the energy-light PoS software over the years, and I've witnessed the difference in my electricity bill. But you probably consider me a "self-interested source" too, because I don't share your same visceral hate of people who decided to band together and run a database.
It is not simply a "group of people who decided to band together and run a database." It is a technological movement of the most delusional in tech combined with the most delusional in finance. It is the hypercapitalist urges of the collective unconscious swirling as an undercurrent, yearning to grab hold of the reins of society. It is an awful, truly stupid way to organize people, and the wet dream of the most enthusiastic is that it becomes a legitimate societal force.
If you are bought into crypto, then yes: you stand to benefit from persuading others into joining the cottage industry. That is not controversial. That is not incorrect. That is the incentives. It is a parallel deflationary economy. If you partake in that parallel economy, you are incentived to sucker more money into it. Simple as.
Why should I listen to people whose payout is tied to their ability to get me to fork over money for 1s and 0s?
What have you done to help police meth labs? After all, they're part of your "recreational chemistry" community.
"Oh, but I don't associate with those guys. They're not part of my community, they just happen to use some of the same tools that I do."
Exactly.
> It is not simply a "group of people who decided to band together and run a database." It is a technological movement of the most delusional in tech combined with the most delusional in finance. It is the hypercapitalist urges of the collective unconscious swirling as an undercurrent, yearning to grab hold of the reins of society. It is an awful, truly stupid way to organize people, and the wet dream of the most enthusiastic is that it becomes a legitimate societal force.
That's some nice poetry, but blockchains are literally an inherently meaningless database of ones and zeros that some people have chosen to ascribe meaning to. It's not like a cryptographic hash can spring out of your screen and bite you. You're angry at an inanimate tool that performs a function if you elect to use it, like a toaster or a kettle. Do you also yell at your microwave oven? Do you kick your TV? Where does all this anger come from?
> Why should I listen to people whose payout is tied to their ability to get me to fork over money for 1s and 0s?
Nobody said you should or have to. But if you're going to start posting misinformation on the internet, maybe you should stop acting so indignant when people correct you.
Did you think you scored some sort of point there, champ? You literally put words in my mouth and then did a victory jig.
I test drugs for meth so people don't consume them. Upon finding a tainted batch, I do my best to investigate and report the offending party to the appropriate precinct. Then I also inform people within a geosocial circle about the problem. This denies profit and helps clean up bad actors.
So, in summary, you played guess roulette and lost real bad, then proceeded on the basis of that strawman anyway. Outstanding job!
And I'm not getting angry at the tool. Truly, to get mad at something inanimate like software would be farcical. I'm not mad at the software. I'm mad at the people. The people who created this perfect shit storm of scams and grifts, along with the grifters themselves.
How many people have been suckered into this now? How many people have needlessly lost so much of their earnings because they, in good faith, trusted people like you and these other wholesome "old school cryptography nerds"? no.
Keep dodging accountability, pond scum.
I write up fraudulent cryptocurrency products so people don't use them. Upon finding a grift, I do my best to investigate (reporting it is futile because police don't understand solidity code). Then I also inform people within a social circle about the problem. This denies profit and helps clean up bad actors.
For example, I wrote up TerraUSD's faulty stability scheme to my social circle months before the project actually ended up imploding and making national news.
But neither of us have some ethical imperative to do any of that. I could just... not be the guy who writes up scams. You could just... not be the guy who tests stuff for meth. There's nothing morally wrong about just using your tools to do stuff, without any concern for any illegal things that other people are using those same types of tools to do.
> How many people have needlessly lost so much of their earnings because they, in good faith, trusted people like you and these other wholesome "old school cryptography nerds"?
None, because people like me do not encourage others to invest in cryptocurrency. In fact, I recommend against it unless someone has some background in computer science, because it's so easy to get scammed. I only share my cryptocurrency knowledge with others if they bring up the topic first and actively ask for my input. In fact, I'm kind of annoyed in a way that cryptocurrency went so mainstream and is no longer a niche hacker hobby - the community used to feel so much more tightly knit back in 2010 when I was part of a small group of libertarian nerds posting on the bitcointalk forums. IIRC, I only missed Satoshi's last post there by about a year.
> I'm mad at the people. The people who created this perfect shit storm of scams and grifts, along with the grifters themselves.
Alright, then why are you mad at me? I didn't create any scams or grifts. The only crimes I committed were to learn more than you about this new imaginary ledger system, then trade some of my Real Money for these imaginary casino chips that I used to play pretend with some of my buddies on the forums. It's not my fault people started mortgaging their houses over monopoly money.
> Keep dodging accountability, pond scum.
Keep getting angry at me for using mathematics. Maybe someday I'll be held accountable for all those poor numbers I multiplied together.
The fact of the matter is that some humans do bad things, and they use the same tools as good people to do those things. Don’t blame the tool.
I have yet to see any value provided by Ethereum, full stop. Its sole purpose is to enable wealth extraction. The internal economics of the whole situation is absurd on its face. It is literally rotten and valueless, except for the purpose of cheating people.
“I have not seen X”.
Well, plenty of other people have. Maybe you haven’t personally experienced hunger, doesn’t mean that everyone in the world is fed either.
Here’s the thing —- whenever someone brings up legitimate applications of Web3, you just ignore them, slink out of the conversation, and then elsewhere continue to say “I have not seen any value provided”. It’s a no true scotsman fallacy all the way down.
The most harm Web3 decentralized finance has done is to people who voluntarily put some of their assets into it — and the vast majority was actually done by Centralized services that claimed to be part of Web3 but were more of the old “trust me” garbage. The kind you like.
By contrast, downsides of other things like fossil fuels, non-biodegradeable plastics and AI are far greater, and you can’t opt out of them.
In every single way, your disingenuous argument against Web3 sucks.
Let me put it simply: the ecosystem is built on bad tech. Immutable transaction history is stupid because it enshrines bad transactions as absolute fact, making the fight over established history competitive and zero-sum. The transaction times make legitimate transactions inconvenient or impossible. The gas fees are unconscionable in how large they can inflate and how rapidly they shift. Proof of Stake is designed to entrench the power of early movers by ensuring marginal rewards go to those with more.
It is a bad system by which to organize people.
It prevent some entity arbitrarily deciding which transactions are deemed bad
> The transaction times make legitimate transactions inconvenient or impossible
I'm guessing all you know is Bitcoin 10min block times, that's ancient tech and the industry has moved past that. Transactions confirm in seconds, and near instant on rollups
> The gas fees are unconscionable in how large they can inflate and how rapidly they shift
Again, rollups are cheap and only getting cheaper (should be 1/100th progressively over the next 2 years)
> Proof of Stake is designed to entrench the power of early movers by ensuring marginal rewards go to those with more
This is a fallacy and has been debunked time and time again
Let me put it real simple for you: biochemistry isn't a scam, you absolute moron.
If your point is that it's stupid to seek a resource divorced from the facts of the matter, then that's not entirely braindead. But I didn't say that. I don't want resources that completely sidestep the matter. I want resources from people who don't stand to profit from persuading people to lose their shirts for nothing.
We ban accounts that do this kind of thing, but I don't want to ban you because before this thread it didn't seem to be a pattern. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on? We'd be grateful.
That means not posting in the flamewar style anymore. It also means avoiding snark and putdowns and name-calling, and sticking to thoughtful, respective comments. We want curious conversation here, not people bashing each other.
Many people find Ethereum useful for legitimate transactions. In this case, you wouldn't even be using Ethereum. Just the public-private key pairs created by the Ethereum browser wallet.
>They also take many orders of magnitude less electricity than Ethereum
Since implementing the merge, Ethereum uses very little electricity:
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/04/26/ethereums-lifetime-...
>Ethereum’s energy consumption from the blockchain's inception in 2015 until it moved to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism late last year is about equal to that used by all of Switzerland in just a year, according to the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF).
*
>CCAF estimates Ethereum will consume 6.56 GWh of electricity annually. To put that into perspective, the annual electricity consumption of the Eiffel Tower is 6.70 GWh, while keeping the lights on for a year at the British Museum requires 14.48 GWh.
So your criticism is at least two years outdated.
>The internal economics of the whole situation is absurd on its face. It is literally rotten and valueless, except for the purpose of cheating people.
This sounds like another anti-free-market diatribe.
Are you really unaware of the horror stories of Venmo and PayPal freezing customer accounts? Or of governments forcing their constituents to use hyper-inflating currencies?
Arguments like this want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own money, in a form more useful than physical cash.
Of course I'm aware of the horror stories of the payment processors. I'm also aware of the horror stories of Web3. I'll take the former, thank you.
You can’t even mine with Bitcoin PoW and break even, unless you buy ASICs, and even then, the % ROI is way less than what you’d get with Ethereum PoS (~3.3% for everyone, regardless of how much they stake) In that sense, Ethereum is way more equitable than Bitcoin.
There are also layer 2s which make transactions less than 10 cents, and will be even less with the client updates around September this year.
Don't worry, there will be Wikipedia pages that detail all of it, years after everything interesting has already been built, after the technology is entrenched enough in society that even the fiddliest technical details meet Wikipedia's standards for notability.
Alternatively you can learn a bit and use your critical thinking skills. Then the source of the information doesn't really matter, because you can fact-check it yourself.
> The loss of privacy
I'm sure you haven't heard of privacy-preserving zero knowledge proofs, have you? They make things so private that the US Treasury had to sanction an entire protocol because the money was too private and North Korea was using it to launder. Unlike cash, if you secure it properly then there isn't a serial number or physical item you could search for and seize.
> There's always the coffin for me.
Dying in order to own the cryptobros. That's a new one.
Privacy-preserving ZKP is not dependent on blockchain technology or ethereum. You can have ZKP without the scam-o-sphere.
And I wouldn't be dying to own the cryptobros. I'd be dying to avoid one of the most destructive social moves in human history. A blockchain future is a bad future.
> You can have ZKP without the scam-o-sphere.
ZKP value transfers cannot work without the scam-o-sphere. Banks won't do it, and it's illegal to do it in a private database, so the scam-o-sphere has to come along for the ride this time.
> A blockchain future is a bad future.
Man, all I wanted was some money that I could store on my computer and that the government couldn't debase.
There is no power in validation. Proof of stake requires people who stake to authenticate perfectly, or they lose a portion of their stake. You lose nothing from relying on a Proof of Stake network.
>Do gas fees, long transactions times, and global gas wars still plague the ecosystem? If so, the assertion that it is "more useful than physical cash" seems just absolutely hilarious
What is this "global gas wars" you refer to?
Gas fees are quite low compared to international wire transfer fees, and that's ignoring new scalability technologies like zkRollups that reduce those fees more order(s) of magnitude. And unlike money held by a third party custodian like a bank or PayPal/Venmo, you don't have to worry about your account being frozen.
And unlike with physical cash, you can can transfer it digitally across the planet.
The transaction time is consistently 12 seconds since Ethereum moved to PoS. Ethereum doesn't have the issues of 10 minute block times that Bitcoin has.
Your criticism is uninformed.
No, actually, they don’t. You are objectively false. Ethereum uses minimal electricity and you should feel bad for promoting this conspiracy theory.
Provide deterministic evidence.
Votes in an election are data, it’s meaningless unless the outcome of the election results in real world consequences.
Balances are just data, unless people are willing to give goods and services for those balances.
A police officer flashing a badge is data, but be may be in a position to arrest you.
Verifiable Credentials is an entire Web2 standard about data. You dont complain about it … well, Web3 assets are like transferable and mutable Verifiable Credentials. All that certificate validation expiry etc. can be done by the current owner, for instance, instead of third parties. It can achieve self-sovereignty, it can reduce a site of massive liability for which we now reuire surety bonds, and more. Even FINCEN sees the value: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-O3r2YMWJ4
But only if you have the correct NFT.
For example, this guy is part of the Layer0 community, as you can see by the little L0 icon below his name. https://caches.xyz/members/25016e3c/
For you that may mean nothing, but for other members of Caches that little icon may bring increased trust to that member, or help him identify another member of his community in a sea of random usernames. Here's a blog post about WordPress and sign in with Ethereum that gives a broad overview of the idea.
https://caches.xyz/the-rostrum/wordpress-web3-and-ethereum-w...
Some communities groups on the site are NFT gated and some you can't even see unless you have the correct NFT in your wallet. If you have a community NFT token we would love for you to make Caches your home. Reach out to @CachesAdmin on the site.
Friends, countryhumans, lend me your brains! Leave behind the wreckage of Reddit and begin to migrate to greener pastures! Join a social community created for nerds, by nerds! Ok, ok ... no need to shove, I'm leavin!