Maybe, but it was under the pretense that the project was intending to be "decentralized", not controlled by whales who followed the founders' advise of disguising their purchases.
The point is that the founders apparently intended for large whales to disguise their purchases. This means individuals bought into a system that was advertised as being decentralized, when it was apparently intended to merely /appear/ to be decentralized. Remember Ethereum is planning on moving to "proof of stake".
>the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information.
That is exactly what Ethereum's direction has been for years now. It is centralized on Amazon AWS via Infura's nodes (which they charge access to, mind you). It's not a world computer. It's EC2 with additional complexity (and fees).
Nothing consensus critical on Ethereum runs on Infura nodes. Plenty of people run full nodes on hosted services like Infura, but that applies equally to the original cryptocurrency and current number 2 coin.
The delegation of node operation to third party services is done more for convenience/up-time guarantees than any node operation cost considerations, and Ethereum would be fine if these third party services were all coopted or forced to shut down, because again, Ethereum's consensus protocol has zero dependencies on them.
>Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow
Really? He has consistently argued for on-chain scaling and for people to not validate the blockchain state much like Elon Musk, with his seemingly 101-level understanding of blockchains. This post is a strange 180 from Vitalik's usual "do the opposite of Bitcoin because that is good marketing".
Now Vitalik is aware of the importance of running a full node and validating the blockchain state, and how blockchains can't scale, and how keeping blockchain bloat limited to allow easy verification is important? I'm convinced Vitalik has been replaced by some Bizzarro version of himself because of how astonishing this 180 is.
It took creating an entirely new separate altcoin, complete with massive premine for himself, and the greater part of a decade, to finally realize Bitcoiners were right all along.
Vitalik was a big blocks supporter for a long time. I saw this post as a 180 as well.
"Now I personally can see that it’s not axiomatically true that doing nothing is safest, especially in the context of a changing environment (for example I continue to believe that Bitcoin’s failure to raise its blocksize by a significant amount in 2016–17 was a travesty and a great violation of many people’s expectations of the protocol, and one that led to more total losses due to excess txfees than the amount lost in the MtGox hack), but this is the argument that you need to be arguing against."[1]
It's literally the only comments on Ethereum there have been from knowledgeable people. Show me a source from an expert that thinks Ethereum would scale
All the experts, including the numerous researchers who work on and have contributed to ETH 2.0, say Ethereum can scale. Any one with a passing familiarity with the cryptocurrency space knows that.
The only people who claim Ethereum can't scale are those who claim Lightning Network can scale, and have aggressively silenced any one who says otherwise within the Bitcoin space for the last six years, while declaring themselves to be the only experts on the issue.
Who cares who claims what? It's more important to hear the reasons behind the claims. Vitalik makes excellent points about tolerances and safety margins needed in decentralized networks like this. People who call for increasing the key parameters almost never acknowledge the fact that things aren't as simple as what some fast machines can process in ideal conditions.
Check out strike app, it is a managed lightning wallet denominated in USD that allows venmo/cashapp style pay to user transactions; and payments on the lightning network. All funded from a bank account.
Nope you can directly use Bitcoin Cash with subcent transaction fees without any other layers. A place near me sells Kava for BCH (supposedly, I have not been to a bar in a loooonnnnggg time).
You can do much worse things in a PoS system since power in the system is tied to the asset (ETH). Ethereum DeFi toys are hacked on a daily basis and millions upon millions of dollars worth of ETH is stolen.
It's exactly why the DAO hacker was censored -- they controlled more ETH than any single account in the system.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that Vitalik is part of the Ethereum Foundation which controls the trademark to Ethereum as well as all of the popular social media channels (r/ethereum, @ethereum twitter account, ethereum.org domain). Ethereum is the illusion of decentralization.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.
> It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.
Cryptocurrency discussions are notoriously filled with astroturfing. It’s a lot like what would happen if present-day nation states quite literally lived and died based on the market price of 24/7 globally traded bearer shares. The saying “well kept gardens die by pacifism” is resoundingly true here, to put it mildly.
Historically, the opponents to the now infamous “Bitcoin as digital gold” narrative were pushing things like gigablocks, nodes in datacenters, “Bitcoin as PayPal 2.0”, let’s replace all the core developers, etc based on populist appeals. There was no way to distinguish between those populist appeals and attempts to foil Bitcoin socially by all manner of biased attackers (and just plain ignorant people).
I think it’s rather telling that after these people forked to Bcash, they subsequently capped the block size of Bcash to 32MB and are now ironically scaling Bcash via sidechains — e.g. SmartBCH — against the backdrop of historically claiming BTC would never increase in price past $300 USD without a block size increase. To say their entire worldview has been invalidated would be an understatement.
Well, I’m not naive enough to expect something else. People are making money and protect their businesses. It is ok for me.
For some people (not for me) living in poor countries, mining was a chance to improve their lives. Now it's sold for the opportunity to give more money to those who have large amounts of money.
All these talks about the climate are so ridiculous in this context - nobody even tried to calculate how much of that energy was produced by the wind or sun.
> nobody even tried to calculate how much of that energy was produced by the wind or sun.
I've definitely seen some analysis that does? But I don't see how it matters. There's an opportunity cost there, where using solar or wind power for something like bitcoin could be better spend on something intrinsically (rather than abstractly) productive, like heating/cooling homes or whatever.
And like, if suddenly it was decided magically somehow that "all bitcoin must be produced with renewable energy" I don't think the world would be made better by the sudden rise in price of solar panels by 10x like has happened with video cards. There's an inherent price inflationary effect involved in anything that's capable of producing 'free money'.
Again, until the price of things needed to build solar panels or wind farms become outrageously expensive because they're generating 10x as much value. Then yes, actually, your choices affect me and everyone else on this planet.
Bitcoin layer-2 massively reduces the amount of energy used per transaction. For every on-chain Bitcoin transaction, potentially millions upon millions of Lightning transactions can occur.
It should always be clear that bitcoin doesn't have an energy use per transaction. The energy use of the network doesn't increase with the number of transactions conducted.
It's absolutely true that the layers built on top of bitcoin do and will continue to present scale, allowing for more and faster tx per second.
Nodes enforce the ruleset that miners must abide by, and can invalidate new blocks that miners generate. You can see examples of this in history e.g. bitcoin.com mining a block with a greater block size than consensus allowed, which caused the block to be invalidated and the cost of energy wasted.
I'm not just talking about denial of service or 51% attacks, I'm talking about refusal of service.
You can't just push some change that 99% of miners will refuse to mine blocks for. The remaining 1% would not be able to mine blocks for a long time with their puny hashrate. You'd have to reset difficulty and the system would be left in a highly vulnerable state. It would be a huge disruption. For that reason, nodes wouldn't attempt to enforce a change without significant miner support.
You can have reasonably clean fork only if enough miners agree on something, but that implies that the interest of miners is given a lot of consideration.
I think the refusal of service is less problematic than the attack where they keep mining empty blocks without including any transactions. The refusal of service will only extend the block time which will be resolved in the next difficulty re-adjustment. It also requires significant percentage of the miners to agree to co-operate.
With the empty blocks attack, they prevent difficulty re-adjustment and also get rewarded with new btc unlike the refusal of service where they'll just be wasting their electricity without any rewards and the small miners will be able to produce blocks albeit in a much longer time than ~10 minutes.
> The refusal of service will only extend the block time which will be resolved in the next difficulty re-adjustment. It also requires significant percentage of the miners to agree to co-operate.
That's the premise: If you want to do something that strongly goes against the interest of all miners, that cooperation will form naturally. If 99% of miners agree on something, the block time would be several hours. Difficulty adjustment would have to be patched in.
In the meantime, the miners on the "rogue chain" are mining blocks and clearing transactions. Who says that this chain is not Bitcoin? Why should all the stakeholders consider a broken chain with 1% of the hash power as the "one true Bitcoin", as opposed to a failed fork?
> Nodes enforce the ruleset that miners must abide by, and can invalidate new blocks that miners generate.
In practice, this means “nodes run by centralized exchanges”. Your narrative is fraught with risk.
Basically “Bitcoin” is defined as the chain with the highest cumulative hashing power¹.
¹: which investors expect will maximize returns under the banner of “Bitcoin”
Much of Satoshi’s genius was selecting values for constants, e.g. 21M max supply, conducive to the establishment of a global currency of fixed supply and generally aligning incentives of disparate entities such that the most likely outcome would be the upholding of community expectation. But none of that is technically guaranteed, rather its continuity is assured with exceedingly high likelihood due to historical choices made.
> You can see examples of this in history e.g. bitcoin.com mining a block with a greater block size than consensus allowed, which caused the block to be invalidated and the cost of energy wasted.
IIRC they weren’t a majority miner at the time. Had they been a majority miner, and had they been able to assure the community of global Bitcoin investors of the superior soundness of their choices, all bets would be off. Ultimately the block size debate was resolved with hashing power.
Important to note that Vitalik massively gains from Ethereum transitioning to Proof-of-Stake since he controls a large percentage of total ETH due to premining it before the project launched.
How can you verify that? currently everybody just listens to what he has to say, when he decided to undo the DAO hack, the original "immutable" chain just died off because Vitalik put his vote on ETH. Sincerely, I really wish he hadn't done that.
That's a post on Reddit spewing a lot of provenly false Bitcoin-maxi tropes. Same old tired song and game. Bitcoin relies on misinforming people in order to stay relevant. Good day to you sir.
I'm not a Bitcoin-maxi, calling someone a "bitcoin-maxi" and dismissing their argument isn't a valid way to counter. Kindly explain the tropes to us and enlighten us why that is provenly false. I'll read it, I promise.
Vitalik didn't decide to undo the DAO hack, there was a community vote (http://v1.carbonvote.com/), unlike Satoshi who singlehandedly rolled back the chain in 2010 after the 184 billion BTC hack.
Satoshi fixed a bug (that reverted it back to the initial rules everyone agreed upon).
The DAO hack actually was an exploitation of the rules that everyone agreed upon in the DAO, recursively calling a function in your smart contract layer is not a bug.
This brings us to an interesting topic, bugs are common in software,
* Should you make the protocol layer so complex that it increases the probability of bugs being found, being harder to understand and potentially grind the whole system to a halt if a bug is found.
OR
* Should you break them up into layers where each layer has one responsibility (base monetary layer, a smart contract layer, a micro payments layer etc.)
> Satoshi fixed a bug (that reverted it back to the initial rules everyone agreed upon).
The Bitcoin chain fork where the bug manifested wasn't reverted. Instead, a chain fork where the bug didn't manifest outgrew the one that did, and is now the canonical fork. If they wanted, miners could continue to mine the fork where the bug manifested. The point is, the Bitcoin protocol didn't change at all -- it merely presented miners and users a choice between two conflicting histories. You can start up a miner on the other fork today if you wanted.
This is not true for Ethereum. Because the undecidability of the EVM precludes miners from determining whether or not a given transaction would touch the DAO contract without first executing the transaction for less than the cost of executing them, there was really no good answer to dealing with the DAO hack. The options were:
* Let the DAO hacker keep the proceeds (this became Ethereum Classic)
* Change the network protocol to prevent the DAO code from ever running (this is Ethereum today)
* Change the EVM so it would permit miners to determine which contract(s) are reachable from a given transaction, thereby allowing them to filter out contracts that could move the DAO funds (a path not taken, because censorship)
> The Bitcoin chain fork where the bug manifested wasn't reverted. Instead, a chain fork where the bug didn't manifest outgrew the one that did, and is now the canonical fork.
That's right, thank you for adding the missing nuance.
Coinvotes in the context of massive insider premines is completely useless. Of course a coinvote would reflect "Yes to censoring the DAO hacker" because the DAO hacker controlled more ETH than the top 3 current ETH accounts. And the insiders stand to benefit the most from proof of stake because it's a system designed to further enrich the already rich.
Satoshi mined every single one of it and anyone would have been able to do same also he never sold his coins and left the project early on to avoid having too much control. Quite the opposite with Vitalik who on the other hand premined his eth, has been selling them Ever since, and continues to have significant control over ehereum.
That's fine as long as we agree that Ethereum is not a form of currency, otherwise it becomes terribly regressive for one person to have that much stake that continues to collect even more ether in the process.
Wouldn't it benefit you much much more because, well, you premined a billion dollars worth of ETH for yourself and designed Ethereum to benefit wealthy people?
