But I suspect even more interesting things than the current applications will come out of the opening of a bridge between pure computation and the material world over the next decades/centuries/millenia.
Proof of Work is much more self-serving than Proof of Stake, as it demands external expenditures to keep itself running. PoS can perform the same job (running a blockchain) without demanding that the world drop what it's doing to contribute electricity to one massive global tragedy of the commons.
Being self-referential is a beneficial feature, not a bug.
> Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc.
That's where Proof of Work ends up, not Proof of Stake. PoW's economies of scale always eventually result in a network controlled by a handful of massive mining operations running at razor-thin margins. The "26 dudes in discord" that people talk about are the CEOs of large mining warehouses with custom chips that make it impossible for home miners to break even.
In contrast, with a well-designed Proof of Stake system, people can contribute by staking at home and running mini-PCs in closets at edge locations. It has the potential to remain a much more grassroots network with less concentration of wealth, if the initial distribution is relatively fair. There is no economy of scale and ideally no concentration of wealth over time - as everyone earns the same percent returns in staking.
What you are repeating is the same PoS nonsense. Get out of here. Eth drove off a cliff when it went PoS. It’s going to zero vs Bitcoin, like every other PoS (or alt) coin. It’s all just PoS cartels. Meanwhile, many people have their “edge” BitAxe earning Bitcoin.
nb: PoS can never really be fairly distributed. It’s printed out of nothing to enrich the founders. The billionaires were dumping Sol on retail last cycle. It can never escape this. Eth was “premined”.
Bitcoin has ASIC monopoly and conflicts of interest with core devs connected to companies dipping into mining.
Solana and other chains are VC fueled crap though, I agree.
All the yields in the world don’t mean nothin’ if the value of the capital is not preserved. To say nothing about “security”. I would argue the complexity introduced by the beacon chain mechanism reduces security… but it’s debatable.
You can keep beating the failing PoS drum or you can actually preserve your capital where other grubby humans can’t mess with it. I know what I’m doing.
That seems like quite the leap in logic to me.
I'd like to mention by the way that Bitcoin has had two egregious bugs that caused network downtime - once in 2010 and again in 2013. Ethereum has had 100% uptime since inception.
Part of this is due to Bitcoin having one reference implementation and Ethereum having five, so it's impossible for the entire network to run into the exact same software bug.
Ugh. Satoshi wrote about this. Lockstep. Single Client = Good. multiple client = menace. I’m ignoring Knots because it’s in the menace category.
Ethereum ignored this wise wisdom and ended up with 5. It’s no good, but in up is down land aka ETH, it’s celebrated. You can’t convince me otherwise.
I don't believe he did, and I'm familiar with a lot of his writings. Do you have a source?
> Single Client = Good. multiple client = menace.
Two major bugs took 100% of the Bitcoin network down on two occasions.
In contrast, several major bugs temporarily took out small subsets of Ethereum validators several times, but the network remained operational throughout. Due to EIP-1559, the network was not even degraded at all in terms of performance or throughput.
Apparently you're right that I can't convince you otherwise. One network's major bugs have caused major outages, and another network's major bugs resulted in 100.0% uptime still being maintained, and you still think the one with the major outages has a better strategy to defend against bugs.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison — I was there in 2013 with the 0.4/0.5 bdb issue happened, it was a split (not downtime), and the community went with 0.4 until 0.5 was patched. The community was much smaller. There was no downtime. There could have been loses on the centralized exchange side for the few hours of ambiguity. maybe there was 1 public report of loss at the time. This is the lesson that ETH people were not around for. More moving parts; more failure cases. More client, more moving parts.
There were several significant double-spends. People were able to create fake transactions and scam each other.
Preventing people from sending fake transactions is Bitcoin's one reason for existence. People made out with a bunch of stolen money.
If everyone being able to send fake Bitcoins around and scam people doesn't count as downtime, I don't know what counts as downtime.
Showing fake bitcoins is actively worse than if the network refused to process transactions at all.
As a side note, due to its slashing system, Ethereum "fails closed" like this and refuses to confirm transactions if the network were majorly disrupted.
> There could have been loses on the centralized exchange side for the few hours of ambiguity. maybe there was 1 public report of loss at the time.
At the time, I remember several reports of relatively large losses (and gains, by the scammers). But the private losses are probably larger and they're just as important. When people (and exchanges) get scammed, they're generally incentivized to stay quiet about it.
> This is the lesson that ETH people were not around for.
The "ETH people" that matter - the protocol researchers and client developers and exchange CEOs - were for the most part all around during the early Bitcoin days.
> More moving parts; more failure cases. More client, more moving parts.
Ten cars have "more moving parts" than one car, and the fleet is much more prone to a failure of one of the parts in one of its cars.
When two parts break at once, it's better to have a fleet of eight working cars than one broken car in need of two repairs.
Thanks for the source, by the way. I think Satoshi was just as wrong there as he was when he thought Bitcoin would become a "peer to peer electronic cash system".
A better yet strained analogy is 10 cars with different parts that are not interchangeable, work differently and need different drivers. Maintenance nightmare. Contrast with say, an Airline fleet all of the same type of plane, interchangeable parts and pilots qualified in that model.
Anyway, we should leave it here. This debate will be referenced in n years as other debates of in previous cycles on here. I am getting more concerned about physical threats after the recent incidents. I’m going to burn this identity now.
Ethereum runs at 100% throughput with 100% of its security guarantees, all the way up to a 33% outage of its validator set. So it stays running at 100% capacity even in a 3 down, 7 up scenario. This has been the case since EIP-1559 was implemented in 2021, and it has been empirically tested.
That's more favorable than Bitcoin, which degrades in capacity (though not security) during partial outages. A 30% miner outage means a 30% reduction in transaction throughput.
The entire point of blockchains is that they are able to thrive and run robustly in a "2 down, 8 up" scenario. That's the sole property they sacrifice so much to achieve compared to centralized database software.
> A better yet strained analogy is 10 cars with different parts that are not interchangeable, work differently and need different drivers. Maintenance nightmare.
Every client is drop-in interchangeable. You don't need different skills to run each one, any more than you need different driving skills to drive a Honda than to drive a Toyota. The only difference is their internals.
To continue with your analogy, you start reaping the rewards of diversity when one car is revealed to have a manufacturing defect and the whole world needs a specific replacement part all at once. This isn't that uncommon. What happens is that the part goes out of stock.
Car diversity causes no maintenance nightmare, because good mechanics are everywhere and they can fix the 500 most popular car models very cheaply despite their varying internals. With Ethereum client diversity, if one of the ten clients breaks down, the fix arrives within hours, for free over the internet - no mechanic trip needed.
> Contrast with say, an Airline fleet all of the same type of plane, interchangeable parts and pilots qualified in that model.
If an airline bought all Boeing 737 Max, which didn't seem like a bad choice at the time, their entire fleet would have been grounded from March 2019 to November 2020.
Southwest suffered a $435 million loss. Everyone who bet on a single aircraft, lost. Everyone who diversified their fleet pulled ahead.
> I am getting more concerned about physical threats after the recent incidents. I’m going to burn this identity now.
It's never a bad idea to burn an identity, but after these conversations, I'm not convinced that the reason you're burning this account is for protection or altruism.
> What you are repeating is the same PoS nonsense. Get out of here.
That's rude and unhelpful.
> Eth drove off a cliff when it went PoS.
ETH is the only PoS token that's been performing relatively poorly lately, and it's still in the #2 spot by market cap. (And #1, surpassing Bitcoin, by most other network metrics).
> The billionaires were dumping Sol on retail last cycle.
Because they gave themselves a bunch of Sol. Fairly distributed PoS coins are not like this.
> Eth was “premined”.
103 million of the current 120 million ETH (89%), you or I or anyone could have bought at the public token presale or mined since then. No one person owns more than 0.25% of the supply. That's hardly "premined".
Compare that to Bitcoin, where Satoshi mined 5% of the supply while the network was little more than a whitepaper and a repo. That's 20x the largest holder of ETH, and it's a real risk that those keys come alive again some time in the future and cause a panic in the markets.
It’s all awful and inexcusable!
(Edit for 60%)
And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy. The history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.
> And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy
You will discover that monetary policy is always set by someone one way or another. Choose if you want it to be democratically elected to serve you government or randos who happen to have a bunch of BTC from selling drugs to kids on black market or scamming and ransomwaring people (this is it's biggest use case).
In the scenario I trust the later more than the former! And that’s fine, we have different perspectives.
You wanna shut us down, I want you to ignore us, See the difference?
You made your choice, that's fine, just don't pretend it's virtuous.
Bitcoin through Proof of Work is a global computational one-way valve for a ledger, which enables a fuzzy decentralized time, by which we can enforce digital scarcity! The ledger record becomes the digital commodity. What an age!
Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc. it’s not really different than 26 banks doing the same. And really you have to ask yourself about the purpose of any of this if you are trading 26 banks for 26 dudes in a discord.