7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where
the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995
and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous
in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the
immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and
consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what
has occurred.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales,
I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and
reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the
internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation
and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales.
9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion
of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250
billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year –
just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be
the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows
exponentially in the months and years to come.
I still don’t understand what a fully realized crypto ecosystem would allow people to do that isn’t already being done well by standard technology. Like it or not, for most people doing most things, the government or large companies are suitable enough of a store of trust which is the problem crypto solves by being decentralized. I think it’s a neat technology for tech people but I still struggle to see why normal people doing most things would want to pay for things with bitcoin.
1) governments didn’t get to print money at will until they went off the gold standard, and the financial regime we have now is worse than the gold era. (Highly dubious, I don’t buy this entirely)
2) blockchain done right gives hub-and-spoke efficiency without creating hegemons like VISA, SWIFT and PayPal to boss around their users with impunity.
There are still significant fees doing transactions over blockchain and those giant hegemonies are what allow things like charge backs and fraud detection while if somone hacks your wallet and steals all your crypto, it’s gone forever. It’s great if you’re trying to launder money or pay for sketchy things but I still don’t get the draw for the average person, just decentralization is not that valuable
People use VISA because they like the convenience and assurance it gives them over cash or a bank transfer, both of which don’t have a fee. Crypto both has neither and is more expensive per transaction.
For anyone interested in in-depth details of Ethereum protocol and upgrades, checkout the Protocol Study Group. Yesterday's presentation was about scaling and Danksharding, given by its creator https://epf.wiki/
What's coming... With the current number of blobs Ethereum will likely be able to do up to ~500 tps on average. ~1000 tps in burst mode. But in coming upgrades the blobs will be sharded through Data Availability Sampling, allowing validators to verify only a subset while being sure that the rest of blobs are validated and available by the rest of the network. This will allow to scale Ethereum up to 256 blobs. Which will give Ethereum a throughput of around ~100K tps.
For context, Visa and MasterCard combined average 10k's tps, and are capable of processing 100k's tps at peak. So if it works out, that would put Ethereum in the same ballpark.
Thank-you for the helpful links. Can you share some resources to learn about data availability sampling?
Also, have folks invented a cheap/fast way of going from L2 <-> L2 without having to do an L1 tx?
I fear that L2s may never be adopted due to network segmentation, but if it's possible for all L2s to interchange with each other cheaply, then it's just as good as L1 IMO.
To transfer assets from L2 to L2, of course the naive implementation is to use a centralized intermediary, of which there are currently many that are reasonably priced. There are ways to go between zk-L2s without any central broker in theory; I’m not sure whether that’s also true of optimistic-L2s.
Attempts to do this trustlessly without relying on a liquidity provider do exist, but they're not mature enough to mention yet. They usually rely on zk proofs to validate that an asset was bridged from one chain to another.
L2s are presently already supporting more activity than L1, with 4 L2s regularly doing more TPS than L1. Agreed that fragmentation is a concern, but I think we'll get there soon where the UX is abstracted away for users and the assets flow cheaply.
I used to think it had something to do with dank memes, but I recently learned it's named after Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist who came up with the idea.
There's a security researcher who calls herself Isis Agora Lovecruft and I'm pretty sure it's not her real name. I thought it might be the same with this guy, but Dankrad seems to be an actual German name meaning something like "thanks for the advice"
I dunno, seems like a plausible trans person name, since we get to pick our own. Also, their twitter profile currently indicates that they use they/them pronouns, not she/her.
Ethereum actually has excellent documentation... it's just that there's a mindboggling amount of it. Apparently it's quite complicated to make a worldwide trustlessly distributed computer that runs on imaginary money which nonetheless needs to be secure.
I'm with you, they feel a bit redundant and uninteresting at this point. Like we get it, a spade's a spade, no reason to go on about it. Imagine people commented "postgres is a database" on every postgres related post.
It's funny how many times in my career I've heard someone say "____ is not a database, it's a datastore" referring to something they made that's basically Postgres with extra steps.
I was just repeating the quoted comment from the post I was replying to. Wasn't intending to say that the article was about tokens.
More generally, I would say that Etherium itself is mostly nonsense. I will admit I don't understand very well what the purpose of the "blobs" are that are being discussed in the article, but from my perspective the entire idea of blockchain technology is not useful. I have yet to be convinced that there is any real problem being solved by it, but there are a lot of problems that are created, which then need to be resolved with ever more esoteric and unproven solutions, like what is described in this article.
>More generally, I would say that Etherium itself is mostly nonsense.
It's "Ethereum". You can't even write the name of the project correctly, so how can I trust you expertise on that?
>I will admit I don't understand very well what the purpose of the "blobs" are
But we're talking under a link to a post about blobs? Sounds like an important context.
>from my perspective the entire idea of blockchain technology is not useful
Instead of trying to discuss that (and I could) - on HN there are plenty links to thinks I don't consider useful, like retrocomputing, programming in AGDA or yet another rust rewrite of some tool. I don't go around and leave nonproductive comments there, i just don't click them. Why do you feel a need to do so?
> Instead of trying to discuss that (and I could) - on HN there are plenty links to thinks I don't consider useful, like retrocomputing, programming in AGDA or yet another rust rewrite of some tool. I don't go around and leave nonproductive comments there, i just don't click them. Why do you feel a need to do so?
Mostly because unlike those other examples, cryptocurrency is actively doing harm to society by accelerating climate change, enabling various forms of crime, and doing financial damage to many people who have been convinced to put their savings into various ponzi schemes. So I view it as a sort of moral obligation to be a dissenting voice in these conversations.
I don't intent to be actively nonproductive with things I say though, and you might be right that it would be better to not engage with my original comment. The parent comment I replied to was not very productive either though. Mostly just "this is good". So my intention was just to represent the opposition and say something like "I disagree, and think this is part of something that is harmful."
> accelerating climate change, enabling various forms of crime, and doing financial damage to many people who have been convinced to put their savings into various ponzi schemes
Bitcoin accelerates climate change - no other cryptocurrency has a measurable environmental impact. The internet also enabled various forms of crime. Bank wires do financial damage to people who invest in ponzi schemes, in more volume than blockchain transactions do if I'm not mistaken.
Basically, I don't look at distributed ledger systems and think immediately of all the crimes that they enable. But I also don't look at a knife and immediately think of all the crimes that have been committed with knives. On the other hand though I've never known anyone who was a victim of a knife-related crime, so perhaps my opinion would be different if that were the case.
I'm so out of the loop these days...I've written off blockchain junk almost entirely. Can someone break down what blobs are? Is this some kind of temporary place for transactions to go so they aren't charged fees individually?
Blobs are a temporary form of data storage that are only required to be held by Ethereum nodes for 18 days. Archival nodes are free to store it forever if they wish, with a 1/N trust mechanism to verify an archived blob. Blobs contrast with permanent data storage in calldata, which is very expensive (due to its permanence).
Layer 2's are currently significantly more centralized than Ethereum L1, but this is not a fundamental technological limitation, and can be improved significantly with more resources and time. L2s right now have fragmentation concerns, where users have poor experiences interacting with a ecosystem of 10+ L2s, but this is largely a UX concern that can be solved in my view, and shared sequencers can help this on a technical level. I wouldn't say Layer 2's have many intrinsic fundamental technological trade-offs.
Faster, cheaper, possibly ceases to exist. If that happens there's (supposedly) a way for you to slowly get your funds back by exiting on L1. The blob stuff is about "ok if that's a thing how do I prove to some L1 contract that I own these L2 funds?".
The actual proving mechanism is either a) too amazing for me to understand or b) not quite figured out yet. But first blobs..
Hey! I'm one of the developers working on Arbitrum's next iteration of optimistic proofs. It's a really fun problem of many parties resolving disputes about a deterministic state. Happy to answer any questions
I'm pretty sure that this is part of the code that implements fraud proofs on Arbitrum One, which is one of the few L2s to currently have fraud proofs.
It seems to me that Optimism is lagging way behind - I'm not sure if they have fraud proofs yet even to this day. I consider Arbitrum to have "picked up the torch" so-to-say.
Right now at least, layer 2s are somewhat immature. Many of them do host billions in assets, but they each have different tech stacks backing them up that are at varying levels of maturity and decentralization. L2Beat does a great job of breaking down the L2 ecosystem:
Note the pie chart in the row for each L2. That pie chart notes the security risks for each one based on their tech stack. Ideally, the top L2s should strive to reach "Stage 2" which could be considered as secure as L1 itself, but no general purpose L2 is at that stage yet and most are still at Stage 0.
As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known colloquially as “pBFT”) which is the consensus mechanism used in a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not most of which have at least peripheral connections to what people typically mean when throwing around the term blockchain. I haven’t followed her career closely over the last few years, but long into the BitCoin era she was leading a group at MIT studying exactly this set of topics.
Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put all the plaques.
So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the “junk” stuff.
If you want to say: “2017-era ICO exit scam junk”, or “pump-and dump altcoin junk circa 2022”, be my guest as long as you cite examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldn’t be prosecuted).
But even there, I’ll remind you that the conventional financial system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever we’re calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia.
To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure he’s getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and we’re frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he’s not sure how much yet).
Maybe I’m missing something here, my financial credentials are modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world is deficient?
This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen.
Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios.
There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains specifically.
Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famous person under that name I can find is a historian, not an expert in computing related topics.
There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on (remember, git storage is a blockchain) but the value proposition of crypo currency blockchains (largely 0 trust) have so far not materialized outside speculative currency.
Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the developers of e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the party that would have to enable something do not have an incentive to give up controle.
I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb: the gentleman’s name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler), I also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers.
His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system.
I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion.
I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily.
The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets.
Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly.
But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area.
It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.
Wait, isn't git more of a merkle-DAG? I thought one of the defining features of blockchains was effectively branchless global state. My understanding is that DAGs are a superset of blockchains. Is this a wrong?
My comment about "blockchain junk" is mainly in response to the fact that it's nearly impossible to find any investment/involvement in the space without running into complete fraudsters and starry-eyed "entrepreneurs" who view blockchain as some sort of god technology that will lift us out of poverty and/or upend the corporate control mechanisms. AKA a bandaid fix by people who don't understand its actual limitations or the dynamics of the systems they supposedly oppose.
As a system for maintaining auditable global state/knowledge in the face of sybil attacks, yes, it's impressive. However 99% of the projects people reach for it do not require it, hence the term "junk." It's more a condemnation of the space surrounding the technology than the technology itself. I figured that would be somewhat obvious.
You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it’s an unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I’m in no position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus.
git is an (often if not typically in practice degenerate) Merkle Tree, the contents of one atomic (and sometimes de facto immutable) node contain a hash (O(1)-verifiably k-equivalent… you know the drill) of ancestors.
In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage. By that definition git is only a blockchain by common convention, there’s nothing preventing or even discouraging arbitrary, unbounded branching other than it doesn’t have a ton of widely valued use cases: most any time you’re fine with a branch that never has any scope to interact with any other via rebase or merge you could just make a copy or maybe a copy and a copy of some metadata/history, though git in practical terms is a good tool for such a copy.
And I think you’re right that as with any over-hyped technology, it gets attached to projects that don’t need it when it’s “hot”, preoccupies both investors and entrepreneurs without better ideas for how to deploy their time and money when it’s “in”, and is therefore constantly oscillating between being a magnet for snake-oil types and being out in the cold.
Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions.
The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe.
Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why. It will never like, totally disintermediate government from money, because money is the #1 national security priority of any functioning government, so inventing money that the government can’t control is more likely to buy you a R9x than a Turing Award (in a macabre way it’s darkly amusing to contemplate the fact that it could buy you both). It also has a positive (in my view) externality of creating broad-spectrum incentives for the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024 and build at least a little muscle memory around running a slightly or maybe even substantially tighter ship on personal digital footprint. I’ve apologized to two friends this week because I lied to them about something that is now news that recently broke on the Onavo/Meta thing TechCrunch ran and I wanted them to hear it from me. I lied about this because before it hit the press, I felt it would have been detrimental to the national security of the United States to talk about it, but what I really wish is that we wouldn’t end up in situations where anyone faces such dilemmas in private industry.
AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.). The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.
> You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it’s an unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I’m in no position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.
I didn't take offense at all. I find your knowledge of the space refreshing. I have watched blockchains carefully from the sidelines for some time because of my interest in the intersection of economics, state, and technology and how blockchains might change those things. Over time I became more jaded because the scaling problems blockchains run into seem to be almost insurmountable, so my interest has pivoted into less-global, more-scalable approaches (like merkle-DAG CRDTs with some external form of validation).
> There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus.
Fair enough.
> In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage.
Have you considered a career in poetry?? Joking aside, this pretty much sums up my view as well. A DAG with a strong gravitational pull towards a master branch with somewhat infrequently changing data. Which also includes git, so you're right.
> Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions.
Yes, agreed. Let's spin up an immense amount of computing power to train a model that hallucinates when asked basic questions. Again, there is a space where the marriage of a large dataset of knowledge and an automated linguistic system searching that knowledge has great use-cases, but throwing "AI" at every problem is just another eye-rolley fad.
> The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe.
What do you mean by this?
> Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why.
This is one of the things I was originally most excited about. Make politicians receive all wages, contributions, etc through some auditable public currency. If you're going to work in the public sector, then you have to consent to transparency. I have my own issues with money (mainly its deficiency for economic transactions) but cryptocurrencies are certainly a step up from it. But like you said, you can't just release some new currency and expect the government to bless it. Some empires had their armies, some their navies, but we have our banks. Our empire is a financial one, and a currency that replaces the USD is a direct attack against the heart of the empire. Many mountains would have to move before that is possible, unless Wall St finds some extra utility in it that allows them to extract more.
> the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024
100%...cryptographic identity is going to be huge in the next few years (I'm betting on it quite heavily https://stamp-protocol.github.io/).
> AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.).
Yes, exactly, LLMs as they are are a glorified search engine. Search engines have consumed themselves trying to tailor results to their users instead of just fucking showing objective information and are becoming essentially obsolete pay-to-play ad machines.
> The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.
Well, there's more here. As AI markets itself as this sort of objective intelligence machine, it garners more and more trust. As this solidifies it has the potential to shape perception over time to the benefit of the operators/controllers. The obvious conclusion is snuck in advertising, but I'm thinking much more sinister like the editorialization of information to protect the owner classes and the state from any kind of scrutiny. Effectively, a Big Brother that instead of using fear for compliance, softly whispers in your ear. Pair this with the immense surveillance apparatus we've spent decades perfecting (but it's in the private sector! so it's ok!!1) and we're setting ourselves up for a hellscape dystopia.
Hence my explicitly noting that Dr. Liskov continued this research and grew it in scope long after it had become clear that one of if not the primary application was clearly going to be tamper-resistant ledgers of financial transactions.
It’s also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as someone who even more explicitly did extremely sophisticated research well-received by the academic community unambiguously in this context.
I just do not understand what it is about this topic that turns a normally very thoughtful community of people with a generally very high regard for the research agendas of noted computer scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk critics on a dime.
You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil down to some version of “blockchain is for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud has no place in our society”.
But every link in that chain is either incorrect or selectively tolerant of wrongdoing.
Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of finance.
“Everyone knows I mean crypto.”
Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to them, some positive, some negative.
“I’m talking about the fraud which is rampant and the main/only use case.”
Eh, not really, speculation isn’t by itself fraud, although it is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with a high ratio of speculation to other non-speculative activities generally have more fraud in them, so more or less rampant than conventional digital finance?
“More both relatively and absolutely.”
No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you have no fucking clue how much fraud happens either relatively or absolutely in conventional financial markets. Furthermore, the fraud that does happen is dramatically more likely to be investigated and prosecuted, and the victims of that fraud are dramatically more likely to be recognized as victims (unlike for example victims of predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their homes and got called criminals into the bargain”.
I don’t want to believe that it’s just the banal fact that we all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in crypto markets and we didn’t (I’ve never speculated in crypto markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I went into debt when the tech job market collapsed last year, with uh, a little help).
But I’m really struggling here to find a more charitable conclusion.
I'm not against cryptocurrency at all, but you're saying that Dr. Liskov was researching algorithms for that purpose when she really wasn't. Byzantine fault tolerance has lots of other applications, in fact if you search "currency" in the paper she worked on, you'll only find a single match: "concurrency."
I didn’t say Dr. Liskov was doing pBFT research for the express purpose of promoting cryptocurrency as an application, I said Professor Liskov was working on “blockchain tech”, it’s therefore pretty cheeky to call “blockchain” “junk”, and I said that she not only persisted in but increased the scope of such research during a period of time when it was impossible not to know this is how the technology is being adopted.
If you’re going to nitpick in an effort to discredit a robust argument by beam-searching for the weakest-looking link in the argument and go directly after it, then at a minimum, be right.
We’ve reached my limit on the nesting of a contentious sub-thread (frankly I’m surprised we haven’t reached HN’s limit on such).
If I’m mistaken about this, I want to be educated about it, I hold all of the famous computer scientists I’ve mentioned in extremely high regard and if I’ve been inadvertently spreading falsehoods it’s a priority to me to both stop doing that and depending on the degree of such an error if it is one, a formal apology could even be in order.
I do not think that this remains a useful or even acceptable forum for that conversation however.
If you know or strongly believe that I’ve made statements about public figures that I admire and that are inaccurate, I’d not only invite but explicitly request that you contact me directly to straighten it out without the distractions and perverse incentives of an audience to a debate that has become more than “spirited”.
I’m reachable at b7r6@b7r6.net and I hope to continue this discussion in a more productive forum than this particular sub-thread.
Just a note, the person you’ve responded to is different from the person who made the “joke,” (if that is the right interpretation. I don’t really get the joke, fwiw).
It doesn’t really make sense anyway; if the joke is that the comment is “backed” by the fact that HN users are upvoting it—comment scores aren’t visible to people other than the posters, right? So all we know is that it wasn’t smote into the hidden state.
It's confusing because we went from "decentralized" meaning "an inverted hierarchy" to "decentralized" meaning "a hierarchy seen from the other direction".
Banking is a centralized model. Participantation in banking can be said to be, from the perspective of the participant, decentralized. The participant's perspective on the hierarchy is inverted, but the model itself is unchanged.
Etherium is a decentralized model. Its model is an actually inverted hierarchy.
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly.
Really looking forward to the next couple years. Everyone has been writing this off as "no killer apps after 10 years" but there's a lot that's been happening to support adoption, from scaling to improved UX. In the next couple years those should percolate to production apps.
The primary improvements have been rollups, blobs, account abstraction, and chain abstraction.
What value proposition does crypto offer that existing solutions do not?
The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is “decentralization” and the lack of trust required.
The problem is, most people are perfectly fine trusting their financial institutions.
Another commenter was downvoted for saying “No one cares”, but a more precise way of putting this is “the average person doesn’t care about decentralization” and this is spot on.
It’s cool tech, but it reminds me a bit of math research - towers of abstractions built over decades, with little effect on the real world. We can only hope that some benefits will be uncovered down the line.
That’s what blockchain technology is: interesting research which will never be popular with or relevant to a lay person (outside of speculative bubbles)
> The only reasonable answer crypto advocates can ever offer is “decentralization” and the lack of trust required.
That a very big "only". For me that's the killer app. I do not trust financial institutions and the ones that I trust do not want to accept me as their customer.
> “the average person doesn’t care about decentralization”
It's like saying "the average person does not care about a system of interconnected computer networks that communicates through TCP/IP". The average person cares about watching reels on Instagram or sending messages through WhatsApp.
> That’s what blockchain technology is: interesting research which will never be popular
I have no doubt that someone said the same regarding the Internet.
Lots of that advanced math research finds its way into practical engineering (cryptography, digital media, compression, physics, AI, and so on). The average layperson does not care about mathematics, period.
You may see a similar situation one day: some application might move to settle their economic value on Eth L2 rather than Stripe, eg for more control or lower fees. To the average layperson, they wouldn’t know/care about how the app works under the hood.
If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and self-custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows immediately that you see value in cryptocurrency.
Because you cannot use cash to transact globally, and you cannot use digital forms of central bank issued currency permissionlessly or have self-custody. Cryptocurrency gives you all those three properties.
So you must give up something. HNers typically are willing to give up the permissionless and self-custody properties. After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected. But at a minimum you should consider that, not all the world lives under those circumstances. And that there are no guarantees that those circumstances will always be preserved in your cozy first world country. Certainly if you are willing to give them up so easily.
Don't be so quick to assume it cannot happen where you live. One day they may go after some fringe truckers protesting in Canada. Another day they may go after some camgirls earning a living in ways that some executive board of a payment processor considers reprobable. Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
> If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and self-custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows immediately that you see value in cryptocurrency.
Those two separate sentences do not immediately team up to somehow lead to the third sentence.
> After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected.
As do most crypto proponents who imagine the world outside the "enlightened West" as barbaric lawless lands governed by roaming bands Mad Max-style.
Even though than we can take a popular online service that people pay for and see in which countries it's available. For example, Spotify says it's available in 238 countries and territories: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/where-spotify-is-avai.... It does not accept any form of crypto currency as payment. This means that people in these countries have enough financial institutions and methods, and enough security to be able to pay for an international music streaming service [1].
> Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.
Or some day the Mad Max-style roaming gang will break down your door and steal all your cash. Or break all your fingers until you give them access to all your wallets.
Exactly. I mean, you don't even have to trust financial institutions. You only have to trust the institutions that are in charge of maintaining law and order. Everything else follows from that. And if you can't trust those, then you have bigger problems that cannot be fixed with some damn cryptocurrency.
Decentralization of compute is perhaps a more compelling story. There have been many recent complaints of massive digital networks being at the whim of centralized IP and platform owners making unpopular decisions - whether in social media or games. Even non-profit and volunteer projects collapse when leaders abandon ship or become tyrants. What if open source code could also be extended to open decentralized hosting via micropayments - the direction of which all decided by users in a participatory format - whether via representative republic, direct democracy, or elected dictator?
The obstacle is human nature and ease-of-use friction - taking responsibility for maintenance and innovation and imposing a participatory need requires a modicum of awareness and willingness to contribute - even if only with pennies. This is annoying and wasteful red tape for most, and so corporations with strong advertisers and investors who can provide it cheaper or for free are obviously seen as the better choice. Co-ops and communes have this problem.
I don't understand half of this. How do I go from "yay, I read the bitcoin paper" to this? A single comprehensive resource so I'm not hoovering crumbs from site to site.
There is a lot to learn but it's all well-organized here: https://a16z.com/tag/the-canons/ It would take even a bright student a year or two to go through all of this so pick and choose as you see fit. a16z has an excellent AI canon as well for self-study: https://a16z.com/ai-canon/
Maybe ETH should focus on solving their scaling so the layer 1 doesn't cost arm and leg to do transfer on. Layer 2 becoming expensive as well and people already talking about Layer 3.
Eventually, statelessness will help increase gas limit on L1.
However, Ethereum L1 is supposed to be the settlement layer for rollups, and high security requirement transactions, not for shitcoin trading.
Recursive rollups (L3s,L4s) have also been talked about for years now, and it should be pursued; that's how you can increase transaction throughput and decrease fees with the magic of zk.
> On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844, aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and the fee market activate as the blobscriptions protocol started to use them. Blobs are not free, but they remain much cheaper than calldata.
> proto-danksharding
> rollups
> blobscriptions
> calldata
I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his disciples, but we are deep deep into "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" territory here.
Does anyone know if you can use multiple slurp juices on a single danksharded blob?
Typically when there's a highly technical topic on HN that I don't understand, I don't comment on the thread about the domain jargon going over my head.
I didn't go into today's Babylon thread and comment "Node geometry? Gaussian splat rendering? We are deep into angels dancing on a pin territory. Just use jQuery."
I just don't understand the mentality of comments like yours, I suppose.
I suppose the difference is that in most technical topics the complexity is either inherent (quantum mechanics just is this way) or exists for a good reason (consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem).
IMHO this is not true in cryptocurrency, which is more akin to a self-sustaining pyramid scheme where the complexity serves to obscure the reality of the thing and draw in more rubes. All the nonsensical jargon around NFTs was trying to hide the fact that paying money for a URL to a jpeg of a monkey is stupid. As best I can gather, all this new "layer 2" nonsense is to try and hide the fact that blockchain is a slow, crappy database.
You're entitled to your opinion on that, I suppose. As someone who actually does understand most of the jargon (because it's what I do for a living), data availability sampling feels to me just as inherent to good blockchain design as fast fourier transforms are to good digital signal processing.
> consensus algorithms are complicated but they solve a hard problem
Ironically, this article is about an algorithm that comes to consensus on and distributes data. Yes it's a hard problem, thus the article.
This is not really an article about cryptocurrency or monkey jpegs, it's a nitty-gritty article about the design of a computer protocol, written for the benefit of protocol researchers and implementers. If it's nonsensical to you, perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.
> perhaps consider that you're not the target audience.
I literally said, "I realize this post is the High Priest of Ethereum preaching to his disciples" before going on to laugh at his gibberish.
It's fine if you're into this stuff, but the cryptocurrency people can't seem to decide if they're a bunch of nerd hobbyists or the Future of Finance.
If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about. If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.
I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.
> the cryptocurrency people can't seem to decide if they're a bunch of nerd hobbyists or the Future of Finance
I think it's strange to take a diverse set of people from around the world, from hobbyists to open source developers to fortune 500 teams, and group them all together as "cryptocurrency people", as if they represent a united movement towards a single goal.
It's as if I said "those Linux people can't decide whether they want to be nerd hobbyists or the future of server computing" while pointing out the seeming contradiction between Red Hat Linux and Hannah Montana Linux, both produced by the same "group" of "those Linux people".
Or it's as if I compared a unicycle to a fighter jet, both made by "those vehicle people".
> If you want to be HAM radio, then fine, nobody except your club needs to understand or care what you're talking about.
It doesn't matter much what I want it to be. It just is.
I find it unorthodox to compare a software standard to a "club". I'm imagining someone refer to the worldwide group of Linux users as a "club". Much like Linux, I don't need to explain to the world how cryptocurrency works in order for it to be useful to me, nor do I consider myself part of a club for using it. It's just there and I use it. As Andreessen Horowitz said many years ago, "It’s becoming like air or water. It just is, like it or hate it. It just is."
> If you think you're going to upend the world economy and force all the rest of us to use your bullshit, then you better expect the rest of us to demand explanations in plain English.
I don't know where you're getting this adversarial tone from. Nobody was or is "forced" to do anything. This is not "me vs you". We're commenting on a post about a piece of software.
It seems to me like you're trying to defend something or express some deeper frustration, and I'd be curious to know what it is. To you it's not just a piece of accounting software, is it? This software must represent some ideological point that is dear to you.
> I could tell my grandma what TCP/IP is and why it's important. Cryptocurrency proponents have been trying (and failing) to do the same to me for over a decade now.
This really seems to me like it goes far beyond jargon. Are you perhaps frustrated that cryptocurrency's continued adoption conflicts with your world view that it is unimportant? That's not necessarily something I can help with, beyond saying something trite like "each individual person has their own reasons for adopting a technology" or "there's some kind of social aspect that nobody has really been able to properly measure" or simply "protocols can be sticky".
I mean, it's a technical piece of code (ETH, that is), and every new piece gets a new name. It's not a more complicated terminology than you'd get for compilers or protocols - TCP wikipedia has "TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets " which has 6 (or 5, depending how you'd count it), technical terms. They're not very abstract, sure, but it's just TCP, and we think that's completely normal.
A logic class will suddenly try to teach you "eqvuilance relations", "Equivalence class", "Quotient set", "Projection", "Kernel" (Specifically in the Eqvuilance relation meaning), "partition", and that's only the terms I found in wikipedia. The class I help along has one more under this subject, and this is a first semester topic that is taught in a few weeks. All of those are technical, and all of those build on some other technical terms such as relations, functions, sets...
I concede that crypto has a bad naming scheme. It all sounds silly.
I can explain TCP for a general audience: "TCP is the primary system computers use to talk to each other over a network these days. All the data is broken down into tiny little bits called 'packets' and sent out over the wire. TCP is important because it specifies how the computers should perform 'handshakes' at the start of the conversation, and includes rules for checking the data for errors, and resending corrupted or missing packets."
I know (more or less) what Ethereum is, and I understand (more or less) that these 'blobs' are yet another attempt to work around the fundamental inefficiencies inherent when trying to make a giant distributed system for ideological reasons (rather than a small centralized system).
This is a highly technical article written by a protocol researcher to be read by other protocol researchers and implementers. I'm not really sure what level of jargon you expected.
This article is akin to an aircraft architect writing about engine design to engine manufacturers - there's no reason to spell things out that the target audience already knows well.
> Today, we have all the tools we'll need, and indeed most of the tools we'll ever have, to build applications that are simultaneously cypherpunk and user-friendly.
> The Daimo wallet is explicitly describing itself as Venmo on Ethereum, aiming to combine Venmo's convenience with Ethereum's decentralization
I will forever point this out, but Venmo has a “Private” setting. Your balance on Ethereum is public, as is any transaction you send.
Because transaction fees on blockchains run as an auction market, low-cost transactions are enabled by high transaction throughput, at least relative to demand. In other words, any chain that has high throughput and/or low demand will have low-cost transactions. Solana and Ethereum attempt to achieve high throughput in very different ways.
Ethereum blobs create transaction space that has a 0-of-n trust model (for zk-roll-ups) or a 1-of-n trust model (for optimistic roll-ups). This means that there needs to be either zero or one honest participant who carefully receives, processes and validates every single roll-up transaction in order for an outsider to be able to prove that the chain was not tampered with.
In contrast, Solana achieves throughput by taking the classic blockchain structure (with its n-of-n trust model) and cranking the parameters up to 11. Basically they said "be a standard blockchain, but do everything a hundred times faster on expensive servers with beefy CPUs and datacenter connections". The advantages are that it took less development time and there are less moving parts in the stack. The disadvantage is that the Solana blockchain is not actually verifiable, in the sense that you or I could download a piece of software onto our home computer and follow along with the chain to make sure it's valid. Ethereum is verifiable in this way, even down through all of its (properly-designed and fully implemented) L2s.
To distill the entire situation: In order to scale, Solana gives up some of the fundamental properties that make blockchains powerful. Ethereum, scaling with blobs, retains these fundamental blockchain properties.
> On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844, aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and the fee market activate as the blobscriptions protocol started to use them. Blobs are not free, but they remain much cheaper than calldata.
Can someone please confirm this isn’t the incipit from an unpublished Douglas Adams novel?
Chill, I guess?
The technical jargon sounds stylistically a lot more made up and playful than the one you suggested.
When did HN become so unbearably stuck-up?
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales. 9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-M...
Case closed.