| HN Mirror

> For something that millions of people across the world rely on

People keep claiming that millions of people rely on it is such a bullshit claim

> with million+ transactions daily

Which is a paltry 11 transactions per second. I think a Raspberry Pi is now capable of the same amazing feat.

> It's using a magnitude less energy now than YouTube or Netflix

And doing orders of magnitudes less while consuming insane amounts of energy.

Had Ethereum tried to move around as much video as Youtube and Netflix are doing, heat death of the universe would happen the next day after the attempt.

dannyw 1372 days ago

Can your Raspberry Pi synchronize with other Pis in a permissionless way, and agree on a shared state despite malicious actors?

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-...

mort96 1372 days ago

Can nodes in Etherium? Or is there a central governing body there which has the power to revert legitimate transactions, just like in traditional systems?

Oh.

But hey, at least it's an unregulated, informal, ad-hoc process in Etherium with no justice system or oversight to enforce the rights of the little guy.

ikt 1372 days ago

You do know you just compared ethereum when it was in its bootstrapping phase to now when it has millions of users and projects right?

and you do know a group of people tried to have the same thing done again a few years ago and it failed right?

ETH_start 1372 days ago

The DAO hard fork was an exceptional event that occurred in 2015, under very unique circumstances inherent to the world's first smart contract platform experiencing the world's first major smart contract hack, and has not been repeated since.

Ethereum at this point - with seven years of autonomous operation and no repeats of DAO-like hard forks - has proven to be an immutable and credibly neutral settlement layer.

You're pretending that tech is more important than the uses of that tech or the outcomes. Which is doubly ironic because the comment above compared Ethereum to Youtube and Netflix.

The 99.999999999% of use cases for Ethereum (or for Blockchains in general) can be easily handled if not by a single Raspberry Pi, but at least by a modern laptop. Because those use cases are currency speculation, buying useless shit, and asset hoarding.

The remaining arguably useful usecases are an exchange of IOUs.

shafyy 1372 days ago

Sure, let's compare the utility of Ethereum to YouTube or Netflix. You must be kidding.

You underestimate the utility of a global financial system which can be participated in by anyone.

This makes many tools and processes (leveraged financial instruments and automated market makers) available without an intermediate third party that most humans would never know existed, let alone how to use.

They are still in their infancy, the investment in knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite substantial. How many years before a regular person can ditch the bank for their own personal hedge DAO?

I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you think that internet TV is more important than leveling the financial playing field.

> You underestimate the utility of a global financial system which can be participated in by anyone.

Ah yes. By anyone. Especially those who got in early before the prices skyrocketed and can now enjoy the global financial system of... currency manipulation and hoarding.

> I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you think that internet TV is more important than leveling the financial playing field.

You must be kidding when you call scams, currency manipulation, hoarding and zero customer protections a "level playing field for a global financial system".

> They are still in their infancy, the investment in knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite substantial.

The only investment in knowledge there was (and there was very little of that) is discovering why existing systems are the way they are and keeping busy reinventing them.

> discovering why existing systems are the way they are and keeping busy reinventing them

You may have had access to those existing systems (the global financial market) before Ethereum, but many of us did not. Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago.

I was a 12 year old investor and E-trade told Grandma and Auntie that they would have to sell their Red-Hat stock, back in 2003 or 4, because it had gone down so much in value that it was no longer worth the monthly trade commission to maintain the position open. We bought some stock after IPO, and had bad timing by a few months. If they had known then what we know now, well...

I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-inventing the global financial system on the internet, believe you me. That was a good investment, bad system and bad timing.

Do you have any idea how exploitative the global financial system is for people who are not "in the know"? It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.

> You may have had access to those existing systems (the global financial market) before Ethereum, but many of us did not.

Many you... who?

> Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago.

That's not "leveling the playing field". It's either "financial education" (because it's something you could always do in "traditional finance"), or "let the suckers come, the more the better" (most of crypto).

> I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-inventing the global financial system on the internet, believe you me.

Oh, I do believe you. Crypto maximalists never talk about it. They only speak vague trivialities and then disappear.

> Do you have any idea how exploitative the global financial system is for people who are not "in the know"?

Ah yes. Unlike the cryptoscams.

> It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.

Ah yes. Unlike the cryptoscams.

> That's not "leveling the playing field". It's either "financial education" (because it's something you could always do in "traditional finance")

OK. Now we are really splitting hairs, because "education" actually doesn't count as "leveling the playing field." I'm totally done here, you just played yourself.

You go ahead and educate yourself in the traditional exploitative financial system, and I'll continue my education here in the exploitative crypto-financial system. And we shall never talk again. That would be a positive outcome, right?

tsimionescu 1372 days ago

> How many years before a regular person can ditch the bank for their own personal hedge DAO?

That will never happen, since these things, by design, offer none of the guarantees that banks do.

I absolutely love overdraft fees. I've never used a bank that didn't have some ridiculous scheme of their own which you had to internalize or pay a monthly fee. Banks offer some guarantees, but they're not really helping most people.

Neither is Ethereum, maybe you'll say, but I didn't come here to argue about that. This is a day to celebrate because the #1 top complaint of all crypto detractors has been addressed by Crypto's second largest collective. Now that is finished we can move onto #2 top complaint, whatever that will be.

I certainly do not imagine, foresee, or desire to live in a world in which people must protect their private keys or forfeit their house to a hacker. But can you really say we aren't headed there now? Is the alternative better, (that you have to trust the bank's security? Are you in the US? Oh god, I have some bad news...)

Acting like scams began in 2008 when Bitcoin was first invented is the ultimate scam. I grew up in NY, we've all been getting scammed our entire lives, by the government too.