Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1078682801954799617.html

308 248 8 years ago

TL;DR: A long, insightful, and at least partially correct critique of the "state" of Ethereum as of today.

My humble 0.02 is that what's current is immature and unstable, but there's a decent chance that Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or both, will at some point in the future provide some interesting technical solutions/services.

The fact that Ethereum is not there yet is not a good enough argument for me.

toufiqbarhamov4• 8 years ago

Other than making some people really rich, what problems would it solve that aren’t better solved by existing solutions which don’t burn energy to create secure entropy?

coralreef3• 8 years ago

You kind of asked a loaded question, but to answer your question; whatever thing needs decentralization.

nonbel6• 8 years ago

"existing solutions which don’t burn energy"

Like what?

jazzyjackson2• 8 years ago

Remittances without high fees.

I think as entropy becomes very inefficient to produce (difficulty multipliers increasing on crypto as the network expands...) it will become more clear that the expensive part about sending money internationally is trusting all parties involved.

You pay VISA/MASTERCARD a 3% fee because you trust them to protect your account in the case of fraud. Moneygram takes 2% of all transcations over $900 because you trust them to move money from your account to the recipients account without losing it.

Even in computer security, you have to put your trust in something. Somebody picked cryptography and high numbers of CPU cycles.

Anyway, you asked what problems crypto could solve, and I guess my answer is, maybe it will cost less to send money around the world. As it turns out, there's not necessarily a way to make it free.

arisAlexis2• 8 years ago

seems that you like many people are very preoccupied that some people that took a huge risk got back a huge reward. This is totally irrelevant but keeps coming up in arguments stressed like in your sentence.

DennisP6• 8 years ago

A simple one already deployed on Ethereum: online gambling, where you don't have to trust the casino to run fair games or hold your money.

As with most things, this can be sort of solved with heavy regulatory structures and enforcement, but I would argue that it's not better solved, especially once proof of stake eliminates the problem of burning energy.

gamma-male3• 8 years ago

DNS

gnarbarian• 8 years ago

I agree. Your position is reasonable and cautiously stated. Unfortunately the crypto hate here on HN is real and pretty disappointing really.

Crypto Currencies are an emerging technology that have value far beyond currencies. IPFS for example, d.tube etc.

api• 8 years ago

The crypto hate comes from a combination of fatigue and a reaction to the incredible number of total scams in the crypto ecosystem.

empath75• 8 years ago

This kind of comment sounds more and more like ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’ as time goes by.

randomacct3847• 8 years ago

He’s criticizing Eth for being a “ science experiment”? The entire crypto ecosystem is just an experiment, including bitcoin. It’s all immature and unstable.

gumby• 8 years ago

You're agreeing with him.

He's responding to people saying "hey, why are you criticising ETH, don't you like this stuff?" And he's saying that even the "blue chip" cryptocurrency projects are still very experimental phases and he takes them seriously enough to criticize them.

berberous• 8 years ago

Except he seems to give BTC a pass. I'm not familiar with this guy and just skimmed his tweetstorm, but he seems to be part of a group that thinks BTC >>>> ETH.

duskwuff• 8 years ago

I think the disagreement is on other cryptocurrencies. The author of the original Twitter thread has positive views of Bitcoin, e.g. this post which he linked in the thread:

https://medium.com/@tuurdemeester/why-im-short-ethereum-and-...

j1vms• 8 years ago

There are a lot of valid arguments to be made, but it's not clear that being an experiment is a sufficient one. One need only think of the "Great Experiment" [0], to realize that immaturity and instability might not be too much of a hindrance if purpose and mindshare can be ultimately established.

[0] https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/the-great-experiment

stillbourne10• 8 years ago

I've always tried to tell people that ask me about crypto currencies that not only do they not have any intrinsic value, but the only positive value that they have is entropy. I explained it like this over Christmas dinner, lets say I wanted to start a new commodity, for arguments sake lets say that this new commodity is based on matches. Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energy. You can use them to light candles, clean out that odor from the previous occupant of the toilet, you could even combine a match with a small sterling engine to create motive power. But my commodity isn't the matches, its the energy used as the match is burnt. In my novelty commodity I only trade in matches that have been used, its proof that the match performed work in that it burned a fractional number of BTUs. This proves that the matches are sound. Furthermore, I, as a processor of used match commodities, can charge a nominal transaction fee when people trade spent matches on my Matchchain(TM) platform. Also, while this is a commodity I will call it a currency regardless of the fact that it has no debt instruments, lacks liquidity and is completely unregulated and prone to theft. Would you care to invest?

Now replace spent matches with spent compute.

hackernudes2• 8 years ago

The "valuable" matches would have to do something statistically rare, like make a pattern of Jesus's face or something. And somehow be resistant to counterfeit matches. Then your analogy almost makes sense.

erulabs5• 8 years ago

Nothing in the _world_ has intrinsic value. Obviously, this an opinion, but I do believe it has strong epistemological backing. An easy overview of the opinion by wired: https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-has-no-intrinsic-value-n..., a 1970s era discussion by a historian economist: https://fee.org/articles/the-fallacy-of-intrinsic-value/, and a deep dive the theory itself: https://mises.org/library/introduction-value-theory

Now i'm not expecting nor wanting to get into a debate about the theory of value. I do not expect to be able to win, nor do I want to, but I do hope some doubt is cast into the proposition:

Matches have a value, you light them and they produce a certain amount of energy

Matches have a _utility_, not necessarily a value. Additionally, compute is _also_ just "burning resources", only its electricity instead of potassium chlorate. Arguably a more fungible form.

regardless of the fact that it has no debt instruments, lacks liquidity and is completely unregulated and prone to theft.

Only one of the four accusations stands up to any critical thought - which is that it is "completely unregulated". If that is the core of your argument against distributed, trustless currency, then that argument applies equally to all pre Federal Reserve transactions the world over, and I'm not sure what the implied problem is.

The best quote from the first and most approachable of the links above:

All new mediums of exchange spawn skepticism, and should. For much of the 19th century, paper money was held in ill repute because it seemed so ephemeral and detached from value that could be easily recognized: land, gold, size of armies.

DJBunnies2• 8 years ago

Send matches securely to anybody in the world, you say?

wallacoloo• 8 years ago

This is a creative metaphor, but like most metaphors, not all of the novel properties of the original system were preserved in the metaphor.

If you want to improve the metaphor find a way to make it so that as a holder of matches I can have very high confidence that there is an upper limit of N matches that can exist at any given time extending far into the future.

Also add some way for me to transfer my matches to another match holder in ten minutes (or an hour, or whatever reasonable interval) regardless of the physical distance between us.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

Cryptocurrencies are games and games have intrinsic value. AirBnB is a game, and if you implemented it as a cryptocurrency it would have value.

There’s nothing particularly special about AirBnB in terms of software. It’s barely more complex than Bitcoin.

But implementing games so that cheating is prohibitively expensive is very hard. That’s why we only have pretty simple games so far, like “ledger” and “compute”.

But we will some day have the entire set of Games Whose Cheats Can, With Some Effort, Be Made Prohibitively Expensive available to us as cryptocurrencies.

Tokens in those systems will all have intrinsic value proportionate to the value those games have in society.

russdpale2• 8 years ago

The difference, however, is that the compute is actually doing something: trustlessly verifying the ledger (or chain). Whereas in your description to your family members, your burning the match does nothing of any value, for anyone, for any reason.

I find many other issues with your framing of bitcoin, but the above is the most glaring, to me.

knowThySelfx• 8 years ago

Do we even think a person called Satoshi Nakomoto exists?

keymone19• 8 years ago

What’s unstable about bitcoin apart from the price obviously?

h1d4• 8 years ago

Fact that without off chain transactions, it's not ready for any more transaction volume and Lightning is still very much alpha at this point.

You don't see the instability, it's just people can't use it much more with the current implementation. Unstable future perhaps the parent meant.

apo• 8 years ago

By now the Ethereum bloat is so bad that cheaply running an individual node is practically impossible for a lay person.

This is an important yet under-appreciated point. It's now extremely difficult to sync an Ethereum node from scratch. If the processes ever completes on commodity hardware, it takes weeks. And that difficulty will only climb as more and more stuff gets dropped onto the Turing-Complete "world computer."

This situation drives users in ever greater numbers to services that tell them which transactions are valid or not. Verification with a full node, the bedrock of censorship resistance, dies a death of 1,000 cuts as a result.

snissn• 8 years ago

It takes me about a day to sync parity on a consumer desktop with an ssd and a 7 year old i5 Intel cpu

erulabs5• 8 years ago

For me, just about 18 hours with parity on a fairly new i7 and fairly fast (200mbps) net and NVMe disks. Haven't repeated enough to be sure, but I can't figure out how to replicate the "weeks" argument I keep hearing. I suppose on average American broadband (~15mbps) and spinning HDDs the week-long numbers start to seem reasonable?

nostrademons2• 8 years ago

Similar experience with geth on an m5.large EC2 instance and 500G SSD.

The SSD vs. hard disk distinction is key. I ran into the "it will literally never complete" issue trying to sync to an external HD on my home MBP - I ran it for about a week and it didn't work. Tried parity as well, same result. Once I decided I'd just rent a big SSD from Amazon I had no problem.

xiphias25• 8 years ago

I guess you're not doing a full sync. Here's an example of a person trying to do it:

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/37348/parity-fu...

apron1• 8 years ago

Vitalik Buterin disagrees with you specifically on the topic of endlessly increasing impractical eth blockchain:

https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/because-of-ethereums-expo...

xur17• 8 years ago

This is an important yet under-appreciated point. It's now extremely difficult to sync an Ethereum node from scratch. If the processes ever completes on commodity hardware, it takes weeks. And that difficulty will only climb as more and more stuff gets dropped onto the Turing-Complete "world computer."

This is simply untrue. I recently synced an Ethereum node on a 2 year old desktop computer. Took ~1 day.

xiphias25• 8 years ago

You did a fast sync, not a real full sync (which verifies the transactions since the genesys block).

DennisP6• 8 years ago

state channels (ETH’s version of Lightning), but it is unclear whether main-chain issued ERC20 type tokens will be portable to this environment.

The Raiden project is the closest thing to Lightning, was recently deployed to the main chain, and explicitly supports any ERC20 token.

The article says Plasma is dead because...Peter Todd, a Bitcoin dev, claims they had a similar idea and rejected it? Meanwhile, on Ethereum a bunch of teams are actively working on it and the Loom project has a version up and running.

The article asks why if proof of stake is so great, didn't Ethereum just start with that? Because proof of stake had widely-recognized security flaws (like "nothing-at-stake"), and it took years of research to fix them all.

The entire article is of similar quality.

pouta• 8 years ago

Can you share those fixes?

phlip93• 8 years ago

First, some Proof-of-Stake setup:

1. Assume we have some set of "validators" who control the global consensus process. They come to consensus on the current global state of the system. These validators are vaguely analogous to miners in Proof-of-Work consensus.

2. These validators have coins bonded as collateral in exchange for more voting power in the consensus process.

One key idea necessary for Proof-of-Stake is to punish Byzantine validators, i.e., those who deviate from the consensus protocol, by destroying their bonded stake. If you misbehave, then you lose some proportion of your collateral. Thus, validators have incentive for participation (from rewards and fees) and a _disincentive_ for malicious behavior.

This is in contrast to Proof-of-Work consensus, where there is no way to punish a specific miner that misbehaves--we cannot programmatically take away physical mining ASICs. Changing the Proof-of-Work function is only an absolute last resort as it unfairly punishes the other honest miners.

So what constitutes misbehavior? When can we confidently punish another validator? An example is when a validator publishes signed attestations for conflicting forks--an example of equivocation. When presented with signed evidence of equivocation, the honest majority of validators can agree to punish the equivocator. This punishment system solves the original "nothing-at-stake" problem where a validator has no disincentive not to contribute to both sides of a fork.

On another note, the OP seems to misunderstand the fundamental consistency vs availability (in the event of a partition) trade-off that consensus algorithms must to make. Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work is more AP with probabilistic eventual consistency. In the event of a partition, the side with less mining power will make transactions unaware of the partition. When the partition heals, all transactions on the weaker side will revert, effectively double spending all transaction recipients on that side.

In contrast, many Proof-of-Stake protocols use a more traditional PBFT-style consensus process which favors consistency over availability. In the case of a partition, the weaker side will simply become unavailable (if it contains less than 1/3 of the voting power). In the event that no partition has >2/3+ of the voting power, the entire system will become unavailable. Also in contrast to PoW's eventual consistency, PBFT-style Proof-of-Stake allows for finality as soon as the validators come to consensus on the next block.

bouncycastle4• 8 years ago

Besides Raiden, you can even impliment a simple state channel in about 50 lines of solidity & it shouldn't be too hard to adapt it to any token, see “Ethereum Payment Channel in 50 Lines of Code” by Matthew Di Ferrante https://link.medium.com/A4wqDWtj2S

danaos• 8 years ago

The entire article is of similar quality.

You cherry-picked some points and rebuffed them, then proceeded to generalize and dismiss all of them.

The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature.

Disclosure: I sold all of my cryptos in Q1 2018, after buying my first bitcoin in the summer of 2013 and loosing a (luckily) small chunk of it in the infamous MtGox hack.

wslh2• 8 years ago

The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature.

People in Venezuela and other political or economically opressed people around the world don't agree [1].

It seems you are wrongly extrapolating the context where you live.

[1] https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

DennisP6• 8 years ago

I picked a few points, because rebutting all the article's ill-informed points would have meant writing an entire article myself, and I didn't have time for that.

If you hate blockchains in general, fine, but that's a different viewpoint than what the article espouses.

swift532• 8 years ago

The reality is that any SQL database would be superior to every blockchain unless your motives are criminal nature.

What if you're a person in China in the future, your social credit is crap, and the only way you can buy bread is over a government approved payment app?

drcode3• 8 years ago

People like Tuur are so frustrating, because they complained about ethereum since day one (while lobbing lots of cheap shots at it) and now that it has turned into a big successful project, they are still around and say "see! I was right! It still hasn't cured world hunger!"

brighton362• 8 years ago

What is successful about ethereum? The price?

Temasik• 8 years ago

What about tezos?

menzoic• 8 years ago

Lots of misinformation in this article. My favorite one is "Plasma is dead". Meanwhile Plasma MVP was just demoed at Devcon last month...

cdiddy22• 8 years ago

Plasma was also developed by the same guy who created the lightning network

kev009• 8 years ago

When reading this I think of my deep knowledge of TCP (especially the pain points) and yet it is "The Internet" for the past while. Compared to simpler protocols like Delta-T and later/better protocols like XTP, TCP still "won" for a variety of reasons (adoption, good enough, numbers of implementation, hardware implementation, etc)

There are a couple reasons I think Ethereum might prevail over bitcoin:

* Vitalik is young and "all in", god willing he will have many decades to refine and improve Ethereum. Think Linus and Linux versus the cabal of Bitcoin and BSD core leadership.

* Most of the criticism in this article are things that have slipped committed or expected dates. The community is aware of the problems and is looking forward to fixing them despite it taking longer than expected. It's ok to be wrong and off on dates if you get it right "just in time" which is only obvious after the fact.

All in all, Bitcoin might be BSD and Ethereum might be Linux. BSD was technically better for a decade, but Linux had the central leadership of a young Linus and scaled better in adding new developers and corporate users into the mix at the right time. That seemed to matter more than quality, stability, and longevity of governance at least up until now.

It's perfectly valid to point out the technical flaws and remind people they missed their commitments. But I'd caution against making financial decisions with too much weight on that alone, which would be about as effective as making them on the expected good will of the community of a cryptocoin :)

kortilla3• 8 years ago

Interesting that you picked TCP given the fact that the TCP everyone runs today isn’t the original one.

dhh2106• 8 years ago

TCP still "won" for a variety of reasons (adoption, good enough, numbers of implementation, hardware implementation, etc)

Agreed

Ethereum is way ahead in the ecosystem race. There are lots more developers using eth and tooling available compared to other chains, and 2019 is poised to accelerate the ecosystem.

The technology still needs work in certain areas (by the way, so does btc). Talented and experienced people are working on it, despite what this tweetstorm says

h1d4• 8 years ago

I guess BSD and Linux were aiming to take the same position as OS where Bitcoin and Ethereum are not.

No one sane would get Bitcoin staffed with complicated features beyond its simple purpose of keeping a decentralized ledger.

Nothing else would go forward if it isn't for Bitcoin running in a stable way.

Bitcoin would be positioned as TCP whereas Ethereum would be regarded as HTTP protocol ready to run apps on top.

BSD's position is more like Bitcoin Cash (or SV). Similar purpose, different philosophy.

DennisP6• 8 years ago

Except that HTTP literally does run on top of TCP, while Ethereum doesn't depend on Bitcoin in any way, unless you count price action and the minds of many speculators.

SlowRobotAhead2• 8 years ago

Ethereum is becoming increasingly centralized.

How do people see the forks, the ‘closed’ meetings, the pivots, the obvious influence that a couple devs have over the entire system - and still walk away with any notion there is decentralization?

bhaak4• 8 years ago

The usual reply is "Ethereum Classic".

If Ethereum were as centralized as claimed ("cult of Vitalik", etc.), the survival of ETC wouldn't have been possible.

Kiro• 8 years ago

None of the things you mention have anything to do with the decentralization problem he's talking about. See the attached tweet.

It's about not being able to run a full node yourself, which consequently means everyone is using third-party services such as Infura.

imtringued• 8 years ago

If everyone being able to run a full node is necessary for bitcoin then it's simply going to fade away into irrelevance.

lawn2• 8 years ago

Because there are several different kinds of decentralization and it's not black and white.

Miner decentralization is important is the whole security model relies on nobody controlling >50% of hashrate.

Developer centralization is another important point. BTC arguably fails at this when a small group, combined with extensive propaganda campaigns, artificially constrains Bitcoin's throughput. There are no valid arguments against raising the blocksize to 2MB for example.

Then there's node centralization, wealth distribution and maybe other types I'm missing.

SlowRobotAhead2• 8 years ago

Developer centralization is another important point. BTC arguably fails at this when a small group, combined with extensive propaganda campaigns, artificially constrains Bitcoin's throughput. There are no valid arguments against raising the blocksize to 2MB for example.

If a handful of people could effectively destroy a “currency” at any point... it’s not decentralized in any sense of the word that is important for trustworthyness or longevity.

A government could crash its own money, but there is a strong incentive to not do that. Bitcoin or Eth has nothing tied to it, it’s entitely at the whim of some programmers who as I understand it, aren’t economics experts.

That’s the point I made above. You want to say the blockchain and hashing is decentralized, great. But when people use that word, they’re talking about (imo) how it’s “safe” to put money into because “no one owns the crypto coin” and if anyone still believes that latter part, well, they probably aren’t paying attention.

dlubarov• 8 years ago

7/ Recently, a team of reputable developers decided to peer review a widely anticipated Casper / sharding white paper, concluding that it does not live up to its own claims.

That's rather misleading. The critique was about Casper CBC, which is very different from Casper FFG. Casper FFG is the basis of the Ethereum 2.0 design, and it's not very controversial. Casper CBC may be more controversial, but nobody is suggesting that it be deployed any time soon. It's Vlad's ongoing research project.

xmly3• 8 years ago

As a developer, I checked Ethereum's code base. To be honest, it is not that complex in the tech itself.

I know it is not fair to just count code lines to compare the complexity. But the Ethereum python code base has only 30K-40K lines code including test while Linux kernel has 15M lines.

mothsonasloth• 8 years ago

Ethereum is predominantly written in C++. The python codebase you are talking about is the Ethereum client / virtual machine of which there are several implementations written in Java, Go etc.

gamma-male3• 8 years ago

Non of you are right. Go ethereum (geth), the official client is written in Golang

JohnJamesRambo• 8 years ago

This is bitcoin maximalist dreck, I’m surprised to even see this nonsense upvoted on HN.

russdpale2• 8 years ago

Perhaps, but its nice to see some discussion in these comments that isn't just taking a dump on all crypto currency like I have seen many times before.

nebali• 8 years ago

>12/ However, upon closer examination [Plasma] was the recycling of some stale ideas, and the project went nowhere

Past tense? this guy isn't very thorough.

arisAlexis2• 8 years ago

This is a very good read from what I call the thought leaders of HN and Silicon Valley. https://a16zcrypto.com/

mimixco• 8 years ago

Vitalik & Co have enough money to hire an army of top developers if they want to try and fix ETH. The fact that they don't is proof that it's unfixable and that they don't care.

cdiddy22• 8 years ago

There aren't enough devs who know how to write/research decentralized apps for them to hire. If you know of them, they will hire those people gladly

xmly3• 8 years ago

FB and Aws both have a branch of devs who know P2P and blockchain.

P2P is not that complex, just it is not worth time to work on it at this moment because it goes nowhere.

Actually, P2P research was only hot around 2000-2005.

frustratedmngr• 8 years ago

I find it extremely disturbing that cryptocurrency discussions sound so much like political debate

arcticbull• 8 years ago

More like religious debates honestly: “the cryptocurrency I ‘invest’* in is the one true future and all the others are shitcoin scams” — like calm down, IMO they’re all scams ;)

* It's not an investment as it does not convey ownership interest.

tim3333• 8 years ago

There's a reply to each of the 50 tweets by Vitalik Buterin on Reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/aac4hr/tuurs_crit...

By the way, not much mentioned in the discussion but I'm for Ethereum and kind of anti Bitcoin because of the awful environmental impact of proof or work which the Ethereum folk are at least trying to find a solution to.

keymone19• 8 years ago

awful environmental impact of proof or work

compared to what? you can't have free cheese and environmental (and social) impact of existing fiat systems is far worse.

Ethereum folk are at least trying to find a solution to

PoS was known long before PoW. PoS is not and cannot be a solution because it doesn't provide objective measure by which competing chains can be compared. only trust in third parties that can be hacked, coerced, etc. oh and ofc "the rich get richer" - so much for fixing awful impact from fiat systems.

jspook16• 8 years ago

There are other projects like Komodoplatform that are make big strides in block chain tech.

Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

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