And I don't mean abstract ideas like "smart contracts", but specific things being done that scams, illegal activity, gambling, or speculation.
Thanks for reinforcing the point.
your tone does not promote curious and enlightening discussion.
Eth is now POS, a laptop in a corner can now "mine" eth.
That's overhead.
It's only people trying to tell me that the overhead is negligible who seem to be under the impression that low technical overhead means low overhead in general. Gas prices are evidence to the contrary of that.
Cost and value are two different things. Ethereum blockspace is in high demand with respect to its supply and that drives its value (gas prices), and this is irrespective of its cost to settle that blockspace (energy consumption, HW costs, etc...).
That's because like fine art, the mechanism that produces block space can only generate a very limited amount per unit time, and latent demand is always orders of magnitude higher than the supply. You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.
...no? Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead. Either paying an expert to laboriously reproduce tiny intricacies of the original, or building and programming a robot to do it.
And of course you'd have to research all the paints, strokes, etc, involved.
> You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.
And that's the overhead, yeah. Even after PoS, it's still a network that doesn't scale. Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.
Duplicates don't sell. This is very similar in crypto - if you duplicate an existing blockchain, its block space doesn't sell. Art - and blockchains - sell because they are original, liquid, come with durable social proof, and have resale prospects and/or utility (real or perceived).
> Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.
I think I get what you're saying - if a blockchain were able to run on a single computer, then gas would be very cheap because each calculation would only need to be run once.
Current blockchain protocols, of course, do not work like that. So if I might try to paraphrase your argument about overhead, it boils down to "if blockchains did not work the way they do, then gas costs would be cheaper." Which I can't really argue with.
On a side note, "can't be done without blockchain" is not the bar to clear here. The bar is "could be improved by blockchain".
"This allows people to break the law", which is what you are saying, is not a good thing, even if a subset of the laws being bypassed are unjust. It's the opposite of utility as far as I'm concerned.
Your second point is entirely fair, but only insofar as the added value provided by blockchain cannot be attained by other means.
That said, in many countries it is only illegal for residents of that country to facilitate foreign money services for others, it's not strictly illegal for them to take advantage of money services that do exist. In those cases, a borderless app doesn't actually break the law.
Basically, I can't agree with you that it's "not a good thing" that Argentinians are able to hold 10 dollar balances on their phone so that they can afford groceries next month. I think that's a good thing. People can afford groceries who weren't able to before.
By the way, I'm going to adjust that bar one more time. Good applications are ones where the added value "cannot be attained with less effort by other means", not where the added value "cannot be attained by other means".
By breaking the law. People can do the same thing without blockchain for less.
Or maybe that's fundamentally an unrealistic viewpoint [0]
[0] https://blog.dshr.org/2022/03/vitalik-buterin-vs-reality.htm...