[alexambarch]

From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.

I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value. I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data transactions. I think it's interesting that I can send Nano to someone instantly and without any gas fees while still using blockchains.

It would be nice if this technology was given a larger purpose, but I think any possibility of that quickly went out the window once someone realized they could get rich. I understand and agree with a lot of the hate crypto gets and a significant amount of the use cases are nothing more than pipe dreams (or just outright scams,) but from a theory perspective I can't help but think it's at least a little bit fascinating to see people try to apply data structures this way.

[ninepoints]

> I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and that this also serves as a store of value.

I find this "value proposition" highly dubious. You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM. Distributed compute on its own doesn't confer any points as a "store of value." The nature of the compute needs to be something that can be done strictly in the blockchain domain, and as we've seen, the result is a system that's easy to manipulate by spinning up new shitcoins, insider trading, wash trades, and worse - not to mention the loss of privacy given how effective on-chain analysis is. The features that make up a cryptocurrency make it decidedly unsuitable as the basis of a modern financial system. Some of the underlying principles are "neat," but that's as far as the tech goes for me.

[gus_massa]

I think it's worse. If you ask AWS for 1000 distributed machines, you can run 1000 different calculations and then somehow aggregate the results.

In the Ethereum network, if you ask for a calculation then all the miners must do it, and then all the validators must do it. So you acually have a repeated calculation, not a distributed calculation.

The only distributed part was calculating the next block with POW, but IIRC they switched to POS.

[wanderingbort]

I agree it’s worse on any measure that can reduced to “distributed computation”.

But that’s not what it’s doing. Not really. The only distributed computation is the one establishing trust that there has been no Byzantine failure of consensus.

Everything else is non-distributed non-parallel computation within a framework that statistically guarantees faithful and accurate processing.

It’s a competitor to trusted computing. One specifically designed against the single entity root of trust that underpins intels offering eg.

[edit: fixed some typos]

[ilyt]

That kinda doesn't matter when the amount of compute is trivially reproduced by '90's CPUs

You can just have a bunch of notes and vote out bad results. You can say "how do you know that 20 different machines you run that do not have hardware backdoor but how do you know software running ethereum is not backdoored ? There is no protection for the compute engine being backdoored, just the fact you'd need to get that backdoored software to most nodes.

[wanderingbort]

In order to convince one honest node you’d have to backdoor every node they talk to.

Multiple independent implementations co-exist on the network including many private implementations.

Perhaps the best defense is the vigilance of the community as they regularly build consensus around the head blocks hash which is hard to forge if the ledger contains any material impacts of an exploit.

Trivial detection of malicious acts is the feature.

It’s true it’s not perfect but your analysis trivializes the effort to compromise even one honest node.

[ilyt]

Or you can get your raspberry pi, some desktop from the 90s and random used laptop and get 1000x the "secure computing power" that couldn't be reasonably hardware-backdoored too.

Crypto for compute is entirely useless use case.

[barbariangrunge]

This thread is the only rational, technically informed discussion of crypto I’ve ever read. Both sides being polite to each other while making technical or philosophical arguments

[latchkey]

1. ETH switched off PoW to PoS, last year.

2. When ETH was PoW, miners were not doing any calculations. It was simply building a hash for a block template that a pool provided.

[alexambarch]

> You can already rent compute globally and perform computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM

True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself to make those changes is a digital token is what I find interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the fact that people arguably care about the state of this system is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.

[threeseed]

The problem is the shared state is so small and expensive that the majority of the state gets managed elsewhere and is merely linked to the chain.

And so it's debatable if you've really achieved all that much.

[yunohn]

What does this state hold exactly?

[alexambarch]

What entity an ENS record is registered to, who owns what JPEG, who sent who some Ether...

Ethereum is one big state machine so that state holds everything.

[Yizahi]

For ENS - yes, for JPEG or whatever else - definitively no. There is literally nothing stored inside the token to describe who owns a digital or physical artifact outside of blockchain and it is technically impossible to store such info in the blockchain, while keeping even a current sham of decentralization, transaction throughput and gas price.

[nradov]

Ethereum (or any other blockchain) is unable to establish legal ownership of a JPEG.

[wanderingbort]

The interface to the globally available computation is a bit different and I think novel.

In order for my application and yours to interact we had to both chose the same ecosystem and invest in it to some minimal degree.

It’s easy to frame that negatively.

But there are some positive aspects to that mutual agreement to invest. Similar to how you may deploy an open standard of authentication inside your infrastructure, the expectation is that the community will improve tools and share innovations over time even if you aren’t directly interacting with any of them. It’s not required. It’s just an expectation.

Ethereum is like that. There is a community of developers extending the ecosystem and it’s exclusively people who invest in and use the platform.

We can mince words over the value prop of cryptocurrency and a decentralized ledger but, I don’t get the same belonging to a community on AWS or GCP.

FWIW most of the people I work with in the community dislike the same scammers that you do.

[mattdesl]

Placing control of the world’s compute under a small handful of powerful megacorps is not exactly ideal. Imagining a future where we can use and participate in (as stakers/validators) decentralized compute, storage, transactions, contracts, etc is pretty interesting.

[anonymouskimmer]

This blog post has a bunch of citations "showing that some assertion about the cryptocurrency ecosystem that crypto-bros make can't be true". And unfortunately decentralizing away from a small handful of powerful entities is one of these things. Below is one example.

https://blog.dshr.org/2022/09/impossibilities.html#more

"3) Impossibility of Full Decentralization in Permissionless Blockchains by Yujin Kwon et al (1st September 2019) provides a different formalization of the idea that economies of scale drive centralization by introducing the concept of the "Sybil cost":

    the blockchain system should be able to assign a positive Sybil cost, where the Sybil cost is defined as the difference between the cost for one participant running multiple nodes and the total cost for multiple participants each running one node.
    ...
    Considering the current gap between the rich and poor, this result implies that it is almost impossible for a system without Sybil costs to achieve good decentralization. In addition, because it is yet unknown how to assign a Sybil cost without relying on a TTP [Trusted Third Party] in blockchains, it also represents that currently, a contradiction between achieving good decentralization in the consensus protocol and not relying on a TTP exists."

[pavlov]

In the Ethereum PoS model, those with money perpetually own the network by definition.

At least with AWS, Amazon doesn’t also control the US dollar and the euro. If their service starts to suck, I can take my business elsewhere. But if Ethereum were to actually become a global standard, there would be no escape from the Ether plutocrats.

Any participation you and I can have in a system like Ethereum is table scraps from the overlords.

[anonymouskimmer]

> If their service starts to suck, I can take my business elsewhere.

This is an extraordinarily good point.

Centralization of Etherium means a centralization of both the VM and the currency. It would be as if the Fed and US Mint also owned AWS.

If Amazon sucks, as you say, you can take your dollars elsewhere. If Ethereum sucks, your Ether is going to be worthless, even if you could bridge it to another chain.

[pavlov]

I’ve sometimes thought that Ethereum represents the kind of computing network that 1950s Soviets would have appreciated. Massively inefficient, every operation needlessly repeated across every node only for the pretense of equality and democracy, and ideologically obsessed with a rhetorical illusion of immutability and permanence even though data can be wiped by simple agreement of the Politburo that controls the network.

“Now that the next five-year plan will be implemented as a smart contract on the Sovgosethereum, we’ll be mathematically guaranteed to meet our economic goals.” — Makes as much sense as the guaranteed crypto lending yields of 2021.

[mattdesl]

What you are describing does exist in some blockchains, like Tezos. But Ethereum's governance is social: not driven by token stake or "coin voting." In Ethereum PoS, users do not cede control of the protocol to validators - the users who run nodes and decide what software to run effectively own and control the protocol.

If the protocol starts to suck, users can change or fork the protocol (this has already happened multiple times, PoS being the latest example).

[threeseed]

Who exactly do you think underpins most of Ethereum. It's mega corporations. [1]

And decentralisation in crypto is in reality a myth when you have so many centralised players e.g. Binance, Metamask, OpenSea.

[1] https://crypto.news/3-cloud-providers-responsible-for-over-t...

[mattdesl]

The article cites a tweet, which cites Ethernodes. According to that site, 63% of hosted nodes are run by Amazon, or about 39% of all nodes. The next largest host is Hetzner at 7% of hosted (far lower than it was a few months ago, because they announced they are no longer supporting Ethereum) which accounts for about 4% of all nodes.

Not that surprising, since Amazon runs a huge percentage of all hosted compute in the world. Luckily, Amazon owning a large share of nodes doesn’t mean they own or can control Ethereum. But they certainly do pose a risk to the overall network security and health, and validation-at-home can and should continue to be made easier.

https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting

[ilyt]

The ethereum DAO fork showed that the moment the "big ones" are hit there is not much stopping them from violating the "immutability" promise for their own gains.

Instead of few big banks there are few big mining pools deciding the fate, distinction almost without difference. And in both cases you need money to get in to the inner circle

[vba616]

Anarchy always falls apart. I don't know why anyone would think that's a historical accident rather than a logical inevitability.

[mattdesl]

There are no mining pools in Ethereum today. The chain is "immutable" only up to the point that the social layer wants it to be; majority users can change the protocol as they see fit (see EIP 1559, PoS, and other forks).

[nivenkos]

Most cryptocurrency mining still ends up being done by a few huge companies though.

[mattdesl]

Users cede very little control to PoS validators in Ethereum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685482

[yunohn]

There are innumerable companies you can rent cloud resources from - bare metal to “serverless”. Ethereum, on the other hand, is severely limited in what you can achieve for any amount of rent.

[status200]

It brings a tear to my eye when i read through well crafted ERC proposals [0] and then remember these developers are awash in a sea of scammers, blind hatred, vitriolic ignorance, and of course the traditional systems that fight against any sort of distributed ecosystem that they cannot control.

[0] https://eips.ethereum.org/erc

[bb88]

It bring more of a tear to my eye when hard earned dollars are lost by incompetence or mismanagement -- crypto or otherwise.

> blind hatred

I assure you -- The hatred you see is not blind -- especially not after the collapse of FTX. Most of it has cause. And there are vitriolic ignoramuses on both sides.

[piperswe]

I'm in the same camp. I think a bunch of distributed technologies (like Ethereum) are really neat from a technical perspective and fun to tinker with, but I don't live under any delusion that the global financial system will ever build itself on top of anything that even somewhat resembles the cryptocurrencies we see today. I remember years ago it felt like the community was mostly comprised of people with our perspective, but that feeling has basically disappeared.

[noman-land]

We need to continue to seek each other out. Finance people swarmed this space like locusts but they aren't who makes it special. It's the p2p ethos that makes it special.

[bb88]

I think the crypto folks should just stop doing whatever they're doing now.

What they need to do instead is to talk to regulators. If crypto 2.0 ain't regulated, people aren't gonna use it.

[cinquemb]

I've had long convo's with people at ISDA about decentralized derivatives on chain and risk/collateral management systems.

SEC/CTFC (and their analogs in other jurisdictions) are better off enjoying their revolving door at GS/DB/JPM/etc

[latchkey]

People are using it, today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410

[OkayPhysicist]

That was my view on it back in the early 2010's when Bitcoin was just taking off. Back then, the only people interested in it were either geeks looking at this new weird thing, or drug dealers. And frankly, the drug dealing was "healthy" for the ecosystem as whole: because people were actually using it as a medium of exchange, there was a dampening force opposing changes in value, and so while it was volatile compared to real currency, it was nothing like it is today.

Frankly, the fact that the takedown of the Silk Road didn't kill the entire market is still surprising to me. I'm not sure at what point the speculation bubble started, because I had well and proper lost interest at that point, but the idea that people willingly were/are pouring money into an system that has fundamentally broken its own economics is baffling to me. Transactions take too long and cost too much for it to be useful as a means of exchange, and if everybody is going through big exchanges than the anonymity factor doesn't exist either.

Long story short, it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. If we could stop wasting the carbon footprint of a mid-sized country now to prop up an ecosystem of scams and baseless speculation now, that would be great.

[m348e912]

So many good points made in your post. It makes me think of what could have been if bitcoin remained a layer of exchange. I had high hopes for bitcoin cash, but even that has had it's own challenges. (although it does work pretty well)

[plsbenice34]

Silk Road had no impact because more markets opened up immediately, and Monero solved the anonymity/cost/time factor

[klntsky]

> Nano

> Instead [of miner fees], participants on the nano network are driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an instant payment network they can use without fees.

Is this a 1st April joke?

[alttab]

Sadly, XRB (Raiblocks, formally) was designed that way. Instant, fee-less.

Problem was, there were races and some bugs, which caused a lot of reconciliation problems for exchanges that listed it.

It dropped after 2017, and AFAIK, is essentially a dead coin.

[tim333]

People being well meaning and helping out does exist. I minority maybe but not zero.

[acchow]

100% agree. I was a big believer in the usefulness of crypto before all the "HODL" and "investment" mentality took over. Its value as a currency is eroded with the dramatic price fluctuations.

[calvinmorrison]

Well yeah, the US government couldn't stand having an actual currency to compete with so they relabeled all of crypto as investements. Suddenly all of those rules, tax implications, etc are more important than the tech itself.

[red-iron-pine]

We just watched FTX implode and fleece thousands of people, including many of their own investors. Plenty of other exchanges and currencies tanking hard the last few months, too.

These regulations exist for a reason, and it's why actual investments work.

If you think they're a bad idea then I have a bridge in the Bahamas to sell you...

[PragmaticPulp]

> From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.

I also think a lot of the distributed systems work and technological achievements are neat.

But I don't have to hold crypto to appreciate it, or even to use it. It's trivially easy to log in to an exchange and buy crypto whenever I might need it to do something.

The concept of holding (or HODLing) isn't related to the underlying technology. It's a speculative investment.

I also hold a token amount of crypto from back when I was playing around with the neatness of it, but it's just that: A token amount. You don't need to invest in it or make the number in your wallet go to an arbitrarily high number to experiment with the technology.

[knorker]

You're not the only one. It's just that's i recognized this "neat" feeling for what it was: the same one I got when I went to Vegas and won actual cash from the games.

I didn't truly know that seductive feeling until then, the feeling that will ruin you.

I didn't like that I liked it.

And that feeling i got LARPing with cryptocurrencies too.

[jjtheblunt]

> while still using blockchains

because i don't know you, is that the part that makes you say you think it's neat?

i personally resonate with your last paragraph: i also feel that it's definitely interesting exploring the possibilities of the ideas, with reserved contemplative enthusiasm.

[alexambarch]

In my haste I guess I didn't make this clear enough, sorry. By "blockchains" I was trying to emphasize the fact in Nano that we are talking about many blockchains as opposed to one main chain. Every account has its own blockchain which all get connected via a DAG that they call a block lattice.

The interesting part of this to me back when I was investing in 2017 was that I previously didn't think it was possible to get instant, feeless transactions on a blockchain due to the fact that transactions on the chain still had to be verified somehow.

[jjtheblunt]

that's interesting...thanks for explaining

[IanCal]

There's definitely a lot that's interesting to me in it. It's a tricky programming environment, which I find personally fun, but it's an entirely public global database with stored procedures and custom row level security. Every stored procedure can call others written by anyone and there's a strong direct push towards open interfaces and interoperability.

Unfortunately one of the easiest things to make with it is a new "currency" because it fits so well with the security model.

[jon-wood]

I’m genuinely curious to hear this from someone who’s clearly more in that world than I am - is anyone at all using Ethereum’s distributed nodes to do calculations for anything that isn’t some sort of abstract financial instrument? I ask because people constantly seem to tout the fact you can build anything with blockchains, and they’ll change the world, but I’ve never seen anything actually useful made with it beyond the dubiously valuable ability to transfer currency around the place.

[noman-land]

ENS is my go to example for something novel and useful that Ethereum enables. Instantly propagating private key based DNS.

https://ens.domains

[noman-land]

I'm with you on this. The overfinancialization of this tech bums me out hard. I stay away from conversations where people use words like bearish and bullish or talk about prices and gains and losses. That shit is so boring and uncreative I want to cry.

I like peer to peer tech with no gatekeepers and no intermediaries. I like encryption and the ability to control how my data is used. I don't like the corporate cloud and I don't like gambling.

[lucasgonze]

Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I agree that this technology is really neat. I love the creative computer science.

I think this may be the ultimate driving force behind krypto. It's inspiring. It has poetry and romance. It's weird and intriguing. Those are not pointless things!

The money of course resonates a lot more for most people, which is why all that weirdness has mainly been applied to fleecing suckers.

[at-fates-hands]

>> I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.

I'm here with you. Put $100 bucks in last year and have been tinkering here and there. Unfortunately my $100 is now worth $23, but I'm going to hold it and keep tinkering and wait for everything to sort of pan out.

I still see the potential, but am exploring what else I can do with it.

[rideontime]

What have you done with it?

[j0hnyl]

You are not the only person, there are DOZENS of us!

[antupis]

I think Etherium has real chanse to be the SSO provider of the internet value proposition is just too good vs current big providers.

[AlexandrB]

> I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data transactions.

Every time I read about Iota I get stuck on the reinventing of the wheel that is trits/trytes[1].

[1] https://iota-news.com/iota-tutorial-trit-and-tryte/

[redm]

"From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat."

I'm holding crypto because I think it's neat, but I'm also holding it because there's little I can do with it... i.e., lack of general utility, yet.

[Zuiii]

You're definitely not alone. Despite costing me more thanks to binance's ridiculous "fees", I go out of my way to buy crypto to just to spend on services and charities that accept it - thanks mullvad, gandi*, fsf, and many more! I plan to continue doing this as long as even a single org continues to accept it.

Payments don't need to go through a centralized and unaccountable processor anymore and, given the track records of the likes of visa and paypal, I argue they shouldn't. It's one thing for them to follow the law, but to destroy livelihoods of many people or to deny transferring money when both the sender and the receiver are in agreement for arbitrary subjective reasons is simply unacceptable.

May those who accept crypto continue to prosper.

* I haven't been able to pay gandi yet because they require me to use their weird payments platform, but I'd happily start paying them in crypto once they drop this silly requirement.

[jjk166]

Give it a few years, the scammers will move on to greener pastures and the nerds will keep tinkering. I remember people acting the same way about ecommerce in the early 00s.

[outside1234]

What we have learned from other financial markets is that scammers will only move on when there is regulation.

[koolba]

Not just regulation, you need actual enforcement with a high enough likelihood of consequence.

Just look at telephone wire scams. They’re clearly illegal, but if there’s no teeth to prosecute then they’ll keep on coming.

[jjk166]

Which markets did you learn that from?

[plsbenice34]

What does this have to do with the article?

Seems like an issue to me that any 'crypto' content on HN largely leads to pages full of barely-relevant diatribe.

[EGreg]

Not everyone is focused on "number go up". Some teams actually care about making distributed systems that serve communities around the world, and prefer to see people not have to trust centralized middlemen. Blockchains are not the best infrastructure for this, but they're good enough (Polygon Edge for instance), for many applications:

https://intercoin.org/applications

Having said that, blockchains are going to go the way of mainframes and vacuum tubes eventually. Here is the roadmap of what has to happen for Web3 (smart contracts) to go mainstream:

https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf

I see a lot of use cases for it. Unfortunately many activists on HN love to comment how useless smart contracts are, while also silently downvoting any comments that disagree with that position.

I think the profit motive really did derail a lot of Web3 -- but also the same can be said for Web2, it's just that VCs were the only ones who could invest (until the JOBS act, at least). So Web2 got stuck in near-monopolies, buying up competition, and extracting rents, while completely dominating our public forums.

It didn't have to be this way. Mark Z was an open source bro who turned down Microsoft's $1M offer in high school, and put his software online for free. Even after he coded facemash and facebook, he was going to build a decentralized, open source file sharing system called Wirehog -- but then Sean Parker and Peter Thiel "put a bullet in that thing"[1]. They killed Mark Z's decentralized visions and turned him from an open source bro who loves hacking things together into a corporate golden boy who loves acqui-hiring competition (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus[2] etc.) and then trying to turn them into corporate teams, until they bounce when their golden handcuffs vest (founders of those companies).

The people who did this to Zuck were themselves peculiar. Sean Parker himself used to be for open sharing (Napster) but rentseeking corporations in that sphere (RIAA, MPAA) sued and destroyed it. He learned a lesson and started Plaxo, and other VC-backed companies to basically lock up people's data in giant centralized server farms. It was he who told Zuck to basically cut out the decentralized open nonsense. And Peter Thiel with Clarion Capital had a far more radical vision: Competition is for losers! Build a monopoly.[3].

The result in our society is that Big Tech oligopolies have totally captured Web2 and own all our public forums. Elon and Zuck own our largest public forums and messengers. TikTok, WeChat and others have had a meteoric rise but they are even more closely tied with the government of China than FB and Twitter are with the US government. You'd think We the People should have an open source alternative. But HN loves Web2 and hates Web3.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Open-source_softw...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...

[OkayPhysicist]

The problem with "serving communities around the world" with radically de-centralized systems is that in order to interact with the real world you need to have trusted parties. And with blockchain, once you have a trusted party, you might as well have them host a database. So you get to choose: either you have your trustless, radically-decentralizable system that only is relevant in its own small ecosystem (like cryptocurrency) or you have trusted parties and thus have no need for the trustless, decentralized system, and would be better served with a federated system of trusted parties (like "real" money).

[EGreg]

A lot of the software we need to transact, to self-organize as a community etc. can have its business logic on a smart contract. Voting. Governance. Contests. Investments. Enforce the decision making with rules that no one can violate.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...

You can run an election like stackexchange sites - trusting that the admins don't mess with the votes - or you can do it with a blockchain. (You don't need blockchains, you can use Merkle trees etc. but the point is, people should be able to check the Merkle branch and know their vote is counted properly)

And that's just one example of many. Just like HTTP, the network is global. You could say in the real world you need magazines, newspapers, radio to get the word out -- or a closed network like AOL or MSN, but then the open, permissionless Web put the lie to all that. It was an open protocol, whether it's Web with HTTP and Email with SMTP etc. Open beats closed. People just need the software and the protocols.

[latchkey]

> you need to have trusted parties

My favorite comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410