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.
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.