As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core technology.
Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This sentence stood out to me:
> 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. And so we should go out and do it.
Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an application.
I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about the topics he writes about.
>As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment.
This is exactly my use case (the former not later) with Monero and it's been amazing. Only marginally more difficult than to shop on amazon and feels a million times less sketchy than trying to find something locally. The speculative nature of crypto is therefore more of an annoyance as it causes the price to fluctuate too much between paying, shipping, and fund-release.
So you pay with monero but you still need to give them an address to ship to which some probably store somewhere where the police might eventually find it ?
I guess depending on the local police the chances of that leading to any trouble are lower than getting stabbed by a tweaker when you go out into the community to purchase your stuff
The risk is not just 'stabbed by a tweaker' but 'surprise fentanyl'. And police are very unlikely to come after some random online buyer who is not distributing/reselling.
If your sample is cross contaminated with fentanyl e.g. from a scale there is a chance the portion of the sample you sent for testing doesn’t have any fentanyl. These aren’t homogeneously mixed substances its someone loading a dime bag in a bedroom.
I've heard that drug abusers exploit legally protected status of snail mail to avoid search, and have substances sent to an innocent third party as a dead drop or a dummy address to be intercepted. I'd assume authorities will get to you anyway, though.
If someone sends any comm without PGP or I heard a vendor they are not using it witb someone else and I'm never interacting again. It really is that simple!
It was dropped because they would have no luck proving anything. But if they had your credit card making the purchase, things would have turned out differently.
imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For lower value point of sale transactions you don't really have to wait. And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank. Paying capital gains on transactions and constantly changing value dampens adoption quite a bit though
It exists in the US as well (Zelle), except due to the super high number of banks, not all will have feature parity / have it enabled. The major banks like Chase support QR code scanning for instant transfers, smaller ones might require a phone number or email input via keyboard.
It will exist soon in the US since FedPay was rolled out this year. It will take a while for banks to support it, but my guess is everyone will support it as replacement to ACH.
I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.
Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000 transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.
I would have sworn I read it in the linked article, but it's sure not there when I read it again. And it's not in the oldest archive.org copy either. I can only conclude I hallucinated it, which makes me uncomfortable.
The reason L2s can scale that high is every machine doesn't have to process every transaction.
Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.
Capital gains tax is not a technical issue per se. People also don't buy coffee with wire transfers, but nobody says wire transfers are a failure. btc/eth are better at doing what wire transfers were designed to do. The point is the tech is much better than people who have been sleeping on crypto seem to realize
This was my use case for bitcoin years ago when my wife and I had just got married. She is a foreigner and was finishing school, so I'd sometimes send her bitcoin instead of wire. Back then bitcoin was only worth a few hundred, and sending her a 1-3 hundred a month is what she needed. To wire 300 dollars is simply not worth it, at least back then. I'm not sure if it has changed at all now though.
Something that has likely slowed down adoption: Current payment methods (CC, debit, tap, chip, etc) artificially appear faster than they are.
When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is not waiting for the funds. It’s all trust and calculations of acceptable risk (that’s why the tap limit).
Crypto can adopt that approach as well.
Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where that trust was wildly abused and it’s likely any trust layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented fairly quickly since it’s all tech.
Yup. eth transactions could happen in the time it takes to run a credit card if you wait for just a couple confirmations, which should be acceptable risk for point of sale. Bitcoin has lightning.
As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b transactions. The issues with those technologies are technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even exist in a secure transaction system by default is debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain they are not worth 3% of your total spending.
Wire Transfers are a logistic service you may have someone perform for you in exchange for cash.
Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope full of physical cash.
The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they need to first convert that into a real currency before they can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The 'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency".
I don't want instant transactions. Clawbacks are very useful. Now the trick is to get that decentralized which means things like smart contracts? But still I haven't seen a good solution.
Well everyone pays an extra ~3% on all of their transactions for that privilege, plus whatever costs retailers factor in for rampant credit card fraud. I wouldn't consider Visa the gold standard of how financial transactions should work the whole system is very clunky and prone to abuse.
I'm really surprised sellers aren't trying to use it at all. There was a small push awhile ago ~2015/16 where a bunch of online stores started accepting bitcoin but IIRC they all stopped once the BTC/USD started to decrease.
I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.
The high bitcoin fees killed adoption more than the price drop.
I worked on OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace using bitcoin, and no one wants to spend $5 just to buy something. Artificially reducing block sizes killed adoption.
"Bitcoin but its anonymous" does not make Monero a real currency.
I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.
But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.
"I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card. And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill" - Someone years ago.
Do you expect every store to start accepting it instantly?
Your argument does not disqualify Monero as a real currency. It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
Monero is nine years old, Bitcoin is fifteen years old.
I looked up the history of the credit card on Wikipedia to see how fast that caught on. It seems it had a slow start as well. Things only changed when a big bank put all of its weight behind it. I don;t think something like that will ever happen with cryptocoins, since there are no big institutions that would benefit from it becoming widespread.
> I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card
That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
> And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill"
This is completely disconnected from reality. People very commonly use bank accounts and checks. I know they must exist but I cant think of a single person in my life who would need my help dealing with a check.
> It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
> That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
But using it as an argument against credit cards is dumb.
> People very commonly use bank accounts and checks
Yes, now they do. Used to be that most people held their wealth in gold or literal cash.
> You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
V Bucks (to my knowledge) can only be used to buy Fortnite stuff. Can I even send it to anyone I want? Guessing not. And I'm pretty sure I can't sell it on a market to anyone else either.
It's maybe quick with low fees now while no one is using it.
It has the exact same practical problems every other distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like Bitcoin.
I can't walk into a store and pay with USD either. It doesn't mean USD is not a currency, it's just not usually accepted by stores in my country.
I use Monero semi-regularly to pay for things online (usually privacy products, because sadly nobody is interested in selling me groceries in exchange for xmr). You can absolutely buy things with it.
One of the things that made me less skeptical of Ethereum was that Vitalik has consistently argued based on his view of "Ether as digital oil to power the blockchain", which is to say that the point is not to just hodl, but to create a core technology that can enable different applications.
I still think that we should not forget the "I need a censorship-proof way to send money to someone overseas" story, but mostly as a hedge against the existing institutions, not as an immediate need.
The problem is that this gospel has been said for almost a decade now and despite, literally, billion dollars of assets that Vitalik has, and others flowing this is not happening.
Not saying that this could not happen as an hypotheses but cryptocurrency foundations are far far from business execution basic practices.
As an insider I can say that most money flows to a very small group of people and the governance is not really decentralized. For example, very few people can decide on Bitcoin and Ethereum protocol changes, and these people cannot be changed...
It does seem slow, but they did manage the proof-of-stake transition pretty smoothly despite delays and widespread skepticism, so I give them some credit for that.
He was talking about proof-of-stake since the beginning and every year was talking about the next year. Not blaming Vitalik himself but the whole thing, it is bad to give false expectations.
Another thing, no pun intended, is that the proof-of-stake upgrade maintains prohibitive the network fees for transactions while other technologies have low fees.
> I have no idea what Vitalik is funding. Do you?
The funding of projects is through the foundation but if I remember well the original people and contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees.
> while other technologies have low fees.
Any "Ethereum killer" that showed up turned out to have the same if not worse problems as Ethereum in the moment they started dealing with minimal real-world traction.
> contributors received the ~50% of the total ethers until now.
First: source?
Second: "50% of total ETH until now" is doing a lot of work here. How much was during the pre-mine and how much was due to the sale? The pre-mine sale raised < 20 million USD. Are you counting the people who bought ETH in the pre-mine as "original contributors"?
> Consensus algorithms have nothing to do with transaction fees.
Please don't tell bullshit. Look at Algorand and other protocols, consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
You can even read that in the Ethereum subreddit [0].
> Source?
It is repeated ad nauseam in Internet [1] and you can analyze the blockchain genesis to check it.
> Ethereum killer?
It is not about the protocol but the community you create. Algorand has solved the PoS before Cardano and Ethereum but they are #58 now and the creator is one of the parents of modern cryptography, Turing Prize, etc. Solana is #5. Beyond comparing the Solana protocol with Algorand it is a matter of "business" execution, technology is a smaller part. Probably if Livra from Meta was accepted it would be in the top 10.
Even when you think about Solidity as a programming language, it was not well designed (e.g. security) but that doesn't matter.
I asked for "source" because I know that this is "repeated ad nauseam in the Internet" while being provably false.
The very first result on your google query is a bitcoin.com page that is 404, but archive.org has this:
The Ethereum network started off with a supply of 72 million Ether (ETH).
Eighty-three percent of that (60 million) was distributed to people who had
purchased ETH in a crowd sale that was conducted in July and August of 2014.
(...)
Of the remaining 12 million ETH distributed at the launch of the network in 2015,
half was split amongst 83 early contributors to the protocol based mostly on time
contributed. The other half were set aside for the Ethereum Foundation.
So, the "50% to contributors" is actually 8.33%.
> consensus has a relationship with fees because it is linked with the cost of reaching consensus!
Wrong. Fees are determined by network activity and the amount of transactions competing to get into the block being "mined". The cost to validate a full block is not really different than the cost to validate a block that is not completely full.
If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average transaction fees would go up accordingly.
> If Algorand or Cardano ever got close to the transaction volume from Ethereum, you can bet that their average transaction fees would go up accordingly.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I don't know about Algorand or Cardano transaction volume, but many EVM-based blockchains process a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees. They do all have different (proof of stake still) consensus models though
Let's get Polygon out, because they are not a base-layer blockchain.
> a similar number of transactions to ethereum (or more), with lower fees.
Are we talking about the base currency (Wei) or the dollar-equivalent amount? If Wei, the only way that the transaction fees can be lower is if the chain has a different set of costs for the operations.
If you are talking about the dollar-equivalent amount, then yes, transactions are going to be "more expensive". But even then, it is not related to the consensus algorithm and just the "price of the base token".
Transaction volume meaning.. the number of transactions processed by the network?
If you meant monetary volume, you should have used a different term than one which is well-recognized to refer to the number of transactions (both in and out of blockchain applications of that term)
edit: I see, you're suggesting the fees are cheaper because the token is cheaper, and somehow seem to think EVM networks will have a straightforward relationship between the number of transactions and the cost denominated in their gas token.
I don't see how this follows. The fees are entirely a function of network constants and usage, which have more to do with what people are willing to pay to get their transaction into a block.
Ethereum has a limited amount of block-space, and a fixed number of blocks per year. The gas price isn't entirely a bidding system, because there's basically a floating multiplier which adjusts automatically based on the "fullness" of the most recent however many blocks, but the principle is that you need some form of congestion control
In blockchains which have larger blocks, or more numerous blocks, or a number of blocks/block-size which adjust based on usage, it is not as costly to get a transaction included.
So I don't know about Cardano or Algorand, but many networks can handle as many transactions as ethereum while having much cheaper transaction fees, which seemed to be the point you were arguing against
You know that Algorand and Solana supports a bigger number of TPSs that Ethereum and with lower fees and different consensus mechanisms, if you don't know that I am talking about someone that tries to show expertise but don't have any real one. It is a fact.
Initial investors are also contributors. The number allocated initially is really huge.
I also know that Solana had frequent outages and issues where they could resolve their transaction sequence, because their hardware and connectivity requirements make it prohibitive for "casual enthusiasts" to run a node.
And if "initial investors are also contributors", then you are just parroting the "Ethereum is pre-mined" from Bitcoiners, and we can safely end the discussion here.
I didn't mention Algorand because its overall network is a blip compared with Ethereum and Solana in any metric, and it can barely be considered as Battle-Tester in a "real world" scenario.
If doing DeFI on Algorand is so much better/cheaper than on Ethereum, then why is it only 1/500th of Ethereum's size?
Mind you, it seems that this calculation is not attributing "bridged" TVL as related to the chain size and activity. If it were, there are 330 Billion USD that depend on Ethereum's base layer security.
This has made you less skeptical of what he’s peddling? That slogan is a series of red flags in only eight words. He could be selling actual snake oil.
The origin story of the snake oil trope is kinda cool. Apparently the concept was brought over to the US by Chinese railroad workers. It was made from the oil of the Chinese water snake which is high in omega-3's that actually do reduce inflammation. Unfortunately there were no Chinese water snakes in America, and the American hucksters started juicing rattlesnakes. And then... other even cheaper substitutes like beef tallow, mineral oil and turpentine. [1]
I suspect the Erabu sea snake is the Chinese water snake that was originally juiced? I don't think rattlesnake oil would have the same effect :)
I'll rephrase a bit for the HN crowd: "The Ethereum currency (Ether) value proposition is that it is used to pay for decentralized apps on the Ethereum Blockchain. The more application and users are there, the more Ether is needed and hence it's value goes up". At least that's how I understand it.
OPs point is that most cryptocurrency advocates go for "but my token and hold, it is sure to grow 10x in a few months" and I (like probably OP) consider it misleading baseless hope at best, fraud usually.
Should you not want the price to be stable? If an arcade game’s price went from 50 cents per play to 5 dollars per play because more people are using a delivery application on the other side of the world that doesn’t make much sense from a consumer perspective.
There are definitely bitcoin diehards out there who look at the price of everything relative to bitcoin.
From a practical standpoint, I think most people would prefer it if the currency used by their country of residence increased in value relative to other global currencies, rather than just staying stable (though for hyperinflationary countries, even that would be a major improvement).
Although stability relative to another currency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_system) is considered (by many) disadvantageous for countries with strong economies, because you strip away the central bank's power to manage the supply. This is basically the whole Gold Standard debate.
For blockchain users who want reduced volatility and stability relative to a fiat currency, there are always stablecoins.
But the argument is that the grandparent comment is making is that you should build your application on the ethereum network, eth is the “oil” of this machine, and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is.
So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less (or my costs will be higher or lower) depending on how active the network is.
That makes no sense. Day to day price and gas fee fluctuations make it hard to long term plan. Just saying that if you want price stability use a stablecoin doesn’t address that issue because we are not building the app on the blockchain of the stablecoin. There isn’t an eth stable coin that is always 1 blip to 1 eth exchange rate.
> or a global shipping service, or some SaaS app on the ethereum blockchain, then my customers will have to pay more or less (or my costs will be higher or lower) depending on how active the network is.
Only if you want to have these applications fully running on the base layer, which is frankly nonsense.
To give you one practical example: Storj can provide a object storage service at AWS scale, and its pricing has nothing to do network activity and the price of storage does not change based on the amount of transactions per minute. Unless you want to be paid in real-time and account for every byte that you are storing and transmitting, there is no need to put all of the business logic in the blockchain.
I don't agree with this, but also think you're arguing a different point.
My point was that prices being "stable" isn't actually what's desirable, prices being nonvolatile is.
> So if I make a game, or an uber for dog walkers, or a global shipping service
I mean this is exactly how many of these things work. Uber pricing fluctuates based on demand. So do global shipping prices in many cases. So do game prices on Steam.
Even if the price was the same in the currency you're using (say USD), the value of USD is constantly changing.
> and the more people who use it the higher the value of eth is.
And I'm not sure how this follows. The more people who purchase ETH, the higher the value is.
But using the ethereum network doesn't require you to transact in ETH, only that you pay for the transaction fee (the network cost that makes it possible to to store and execute your transaction essentially) in ETH
If the stakes of the arcade game were so high that people wanted to have its logic running on the base-layer - e.g, high prizes for winners, or the possibility of using power ups obtained in other games - then the price to play would have to depend on the network activity.
But because these games don't, it should be totally fine to delegate this application to a layer-2 system like a roll-up or a payment channel.
But does the layer 2 coin have a stable exchange rate with the layer 1 coin?
And again, we are talking about just to pay to play the game. Today an arcade that uses dollars may charge you 50 cents for a life. Or the equivalent in tokens (layer 2). If suddenly the value of 50 cents could pay for 10 lives, do I need to now charge customers more tokens to play? How do I plan long term with hiring or my utilities if the price I could be paying month to month can fluctuate as much as cryptocurrency does?
Why not just use a stable currency to price your "game token"? Once you are out of the base layer, there is no need to tie any transaction costs to the base layer token.
So, in your example, the game company could easily just say "pay us X amount of dollars however you want, and you will receive the exact same amount on the layer-2 to play".
I feel like we are right back to why even bother using cryptocurrency for this if the fundamentals of it aren’t stable enough for day to day transactions.
My example was talking about using a layer 2 token. Now you’re telling me that it’s simple just use a completely different currency to buy tokens?
Absolutely not. Bitcoin's initial narrative was "digital cash", i.e, digital payments and microtransactions. Given that transaction costs became prohibitive, it switched to "digital gold", or store of value, meaning that Bitcoiners defend the idea that Bitcoin's reason d'être is just to hold it.
I've never seen Vitalik or any of the core Ethereum developers talking about the value of Ether being a fundamental metric of any kind. The incentives are made in a way to maximize utility of the blockchain, not the value of its base currency.
The "beginning of crypto" was with Bitcoin, can we agree to that?
Can we agree that Bitcoin was not claiming to "be a general platform to power distributed applications"? If you disagree, refer to the whitepaper that says "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
Can we agree that before Ethereum each chain was just a fork of Bitcoin, and that the token (aka "the currency") was "sold" to others as something that would have its value determined by supply and demand, but that the blockchain had no use that was not connected to transactions related to the token? As in: fundamentally speaking, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash... are the same?
Can we agree that Ethereum (the blockchain) enables distributed applications where people do not care at all about the price of Ether? E.g, I can host files on Storj and pay with credit card, the people hosting data are being paid in Storj's token, and everyone involved in this economy is directly using the Ethereum blockchain, but don't need to hold any Ether at all?
BTC (and derivatives) were very much "just for holding". The fact that they hoped it could be used for day-to-day value transfers does not negate the fact that the system can only work with a continuous influx of capital. "You should pay something with BTC, but if possible buy back the USD-equivalent amount" was standard advice already in 2011.
> Saying you have some other use case besides asset appreciation is not a unique proposition.
>they hoped it could be used for day-to-day value transfers
And they said this, including Satoshi. Yes they were wrong, but they said it.
>Now, it isn't
It's never been unique, because every coin has said it including, as you have mentioned in every response so far, Bitcoiners.
You've also said Eth guys have said. What are we left with? Every other **coin has obviously said it. I'm not arguing they all mean it, or they've been right. I'm arguing they all said it.
> I'm not arguing they all mean it, or they've been right. I'm arguing they all said it.
Then this whole discussion is pointless. Why should we care about what people say or believe, unless it can be backed by their actions?
Instead of putting them all in the same bucket because on what they said, let's judge them based on what they did. And Vitalik has consistently shown that his work is aligned with the stated plans and vision for Ethereum.
You started the thread by saying you trust the intentions of a coin project based on them saying they're not in it for the money.
I just meant to point out that this was no special characteristic, as they all have done this. "Crypto" has been professing "use cases" since the beginning.
>Then this whole discussion is pointless.
Yes it certainly was, since you wanted to argue that you believe him, yet got caught up in trying to refute for some reason the point that they all say it. You say trust actions instead. Great, as long as we agree words are irrelevant particularly when they all say the same thing.
No, I said that he has argued (to justify the project decisions and work) based on his view.
I never said "I believe on what he has promised". I said "all he has done and delivered has been consistent with his professed views". It's completely different, and I honestly do not see how you could interpret what I said in such a twisted way.
The whitepaper's plan wasn't, but that's not true at all for Bitcoin itself. Satoshi included OP_RETURN which allowed smart contracts - mastercoin being the first L2 (on Bitcoin). He also wanted to increase the blocksize to allow scaling. Vitalik started Ethereum because the "core devs" (bank incumbent funded usurpers) refused to cooperate. This is also the reason the original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
This is all pretty much boring, tired lies that altcoin profiteers like to trot out apparently assuming nobody is still around who is interested in contradicting them.
The purpose of OP_RETURN was to end the script. It was not designed for rando garbage overlays that are worthless; Satoshi's views on scaling were ambiguous—rather than say it "should" he was instead correcting people who thought you could break consensus by simply setting the value higher. There was absolutely zero communication between Vitalik and anybody about his "plans" to dump an overlay into Bitcoin, and his current story about 80-to-40 bytes is a pure, often debunked lie. There isn't a single communication that Vitalik himself can point to anywhere which shows he was interested in "cooperating" and then core turned him down.
His typical lie was that he was interested in stuffing data into Bitcoin, but then core devs "stopped that" by reducing the amount he could stuff into Bitcoin by half—from 80 to 40 bytes—but when he says that he also never points at any discussion, and in any event the direct history contradicts this—no versions of Bitcoin from back then ever reduced anything. It was only ever an increase: from 0, to 40, to 80 in released versions.
There no evidence these people ever give which shows some lack of cooperation with Vitalik is the reason why Hearn and Andresen "split off" to make an altcoin, which itself is quite the absurdity, and if true just means they would have been ethereum pumpers anyway.. so..
This is the same tired misinformation you are spreading from 2017+ and I will prove it with primary sources.
Also, why are the comments on your account 90% calling other people liars about cryptocurrency?
Satoshi's views on scaling were NOT ambiguous. He planned to increase the blocksize and have users switch to SPV wallets. Read section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade."
Regarding OP_RETURN, both mastercoin and counterparty existed because of OP_RETURN, so no, it's not "garbage". It's a data field that can be used to link L2's to the Bitcoin blockchain by embedding them in transactions. These projects, factom, and countless others that built off of OP_RETURN had to abandon Bitcoin for other chains because of the core developers' gatekeeping.
> original maintainers like Gavin and Mike Hearn split off to Bitcoin Cash and other alt-coins.
So what developments in Bitcoin Cash have been made in that direction? Why is is that all of the "ideological" forks of Bitcoin do nothing but tweak some parameter size in the network settings and do not go beyond that?
> As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero.
In the last two weeks I've paid to people who cleaned my air conditioning, my girlfriend's nails, our lawyer, for delivery of some goods from US, for food delivery, for a sightseeing tour, and for exchange to local currency (delivered to my home) — all in USDT. I've also got USDT from a friend for booking Airbnb for him (he couldn't do it on his own account because of reasons). At this point, most of services in local community are advertised with payment in USDT first: via binance and bybit internal transfer, or just on trc-20.
Buenos Aires, and yes — community of (mostly political) Russian immigrants. I don't think USDT gets much use in Izhevsk though, Russian local financial services are pretty good, especially compared to Europe or US.
Is running an app on ethereum still over 100x the cost to run it on, say, AWS?
I hear CEOs talk about how this will revolutionize the world, but realistically no one needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger to validate that someone is the true owner of concert tickets or whatever.
I do wonder, if the only real-world application that needs a cryptographically secure immutable ledger, is cryptocurrency.
Farcaster is not a tool for building social applications. It is a social network with 70k+ DAU [1]
You can use it through multiple frontends, the officially developed one is Warpcast [2]
And lots of people pay for lots of things with bitcoin, today. It works fine, even if the confirmation takes 15-20 minutes and it costs five bucks. For some things where you prefer discretion, it's fine.
For privacy, just use a coinjoining wallet. It's a solved problem for a long time.
Commenters here are sour over bitcoin, for a variety of reasons, and ignorant at the same time.
Does moving funds between compartmentalized economies count as "currency" use? I know quite a few cases of using it to move money from Russia or China.
I think thats only a subset of people offshoring money. Many more who might have more means and therefore more pressure to offshore that means would probably opt to offshore that money by buying a vancouver condo they will never see.
They aren't. Zcash has opt-in privacy, which I think we've established doesn't work. By this logic BTC also has opt-in privacy – just use a mixer. Well, except that your BTC will be tainted if you do it, which effectively makes BTC non-fungible for all intents and purposes.
The only way to have a private, fungible cryptocurrency is to make privacy mandatory and not "something you enable because you are a drug dealer". Does this mean that everyone using Monero is automatically a drug dealer? Even if it does, it's waaay better to have consistency vs having a cryptocurrency partitioned into "normal coins" and "darknet market coins"
I think it's more useful to think of ZCash's featureset not as privacy defaulting to on or off, but as giving you the option to have pseudonyms.
If you were running a non profit and you wanted people to be able to anonymously contribute to it, but you wanted to prove to your anonymous donors that all of their donations were being spent in accordance with the goals of the nonprofit, you might use ZCash transparent vs shielded addresses as a way to create that division between transparent and opaque.
As for t-addresses having been default, that's a regulatory hack. Exchanges have a better shot at being compliant if they can use the chain as a source of truth. So t-addresses let them create a space where they can do that, and then you as a user can privately move funds out of the exchange's domain and into a black hole without having to get your hands dirty with some other exchange.
Yes I know that monero let's you generate keys for this on a tx by tx basis, but it's not the same. It's just different privacy properties with different use cases.
Monero, however, has the objectively superior CLI. It's fantastic.
You could just as accurately say Zcash has opt-out privacy too. And the privacy is much more than a mixer since you got ZKPs.
Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability, which is why you can find it on coinbase. Not that you should need deniability, since no one has any business knowing what you're doing with your money.
> Opting out of privacy gives it more plausible deniability
So if you actually want to interact with the real world, you have to opt out of privacy? And if you enable privacy you are automatically treated as a weirdo? I don't get the whole point of Zcash.
It's the same issue as with Bitcoin – you can make your transactions private, but it's not the default and not obvious for new users, and anyone who does it is subject to suspicion.
It really looks to me like this "privacy" aspect of Zcash is just a marketing gimmick. It doesn't have any advantages to just using Monero in the first place.
Shielded by default or opt in depends on the wallet you use. As you can imagine, a lot of people like shielded by default. There are reasons to have transparent transactions btw. You may want public proof.
Again, it is not the same as bitcoin. Using a mixer does not come with ZKPs. The transactions are also still public. You can see how much was put in and how much was taken out. Worse, you now potentially have traceable tainted coins and a target on your back.
The point of Zcash is the Z. Zero knowledge proofs. Monero uses differential privacy. Zcash has much stronger privacy guarantees.
With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They seem to be the only ones who consistently work towards adding capabilities to the core technology.
Edit: I realize I haven't commented on the article at all. This sentence stood out to me:
> 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. And so we should go out and do it.
Clearly, this is an important step. But the two examples he provides as a beacon of what's possible (Daimo and Farcaster) don't inspire a lot of enthusiasm. Daimo is just a decentralized version of Venmo and Farcaster is a protocol to build social networks on the blockchain, which is yet another tool and not an application.
I do still like reading Vitaliks thoughts. He's a pretty good writer, and it's evident that he spends a lot of time actually thinking about the topics he writes about.