Ethereum founder on U.S. crypto crackdown

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/22/vitalik-buterin-cnbc-interview-ethereum-founder-on-us-crypto-crackdown.html

by lxm • 3 years ago

43 103 3 years ago

api• 3 years ago

“The developing world will keep the crypto revolution going” means “we haven’t been driven out of the developing world for scamming too many people yet so we can keep recruiting fresh marks to make number go up.”

You know what will save the crypto revolution? Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.

madsbuch2• 3 years ago

luckily there are a few projects, Ethereum being one of them.

dale_glass6• 3 years ago

Which uses of Ethereum are positive?

And I don't mean abstract ideas like "smart contracts", but specific things being done that aren't scams, illegal activity, gambling, or speculation.

polygamous_bat• 3 years ago

Maybe if we tolerate the scams and fraud for 10 more years, it will be useful?

Or maybe that's fundamentally an unrealistic viewpoint [0]

[0] https://blog.dshr.org/2022/03/vitalik-buterin-vs-reality.htm...

hanniabu8• 3 years ago

Here's a list of usecases for you: https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/32b0f933618a3229efe3fbc01cb...

throwbadubadu2• 3 years ago

Seriously? Most of them barely make sense and are just "oh let's try this with crypto", what's your favorite one (besides the apparent one)?

skulk• 3 years ago

Putting out a laundry list of projects (that are inferior to those that operate within the fiat ecosystem) isn't going to change the fact that 95% of people in crypto are looking to enrich themselves on speculation or to part said fools with their money.

JuanPosadas• 3 years ago

None of those are usecases, they're just random products that use "crypto" for no discernable reason.

xnx• 3 years ago

Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.

You forgot buying drugs and money laundering

b1123• 3 years ago

Hey! How dare you! Crypto is legit!

I use my crypto to buy extra credits on my private tracker!

yyyk2• 3 years ago

> Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.
You forgot buying drugs and money laundering

Let's not neglect ransomware and spam.

Scoundreller• 3 years ago

And the list of what you can/cannot buy with a Mastercard or Visa varies from country to country. And doesn’t necessarily follow the law.

Still a lot of US banks that block card usage in Cuba, but they don’t need to from what I can see: https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/738

mouzogu• 3 years ago

Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.

Flatcoins seem interesting to me. A stablecoin that moves in line with inflation. https://decrypt.co/155775/flatcoins-new-thing-on-the-horizon...

IMO we need financial alternatives. If you see what happened in Argentina, Turkey, Lebanon...people's life savings being stolen overnight.

There is a problem that needs solving. Whether thats a problem that can be solved with technology or not, IDK. I doubt it.

toomuchtodo3• 3 years ago

Issue them digital wallets to enable holding global reserve currencies. It is an AML/KYC problem. Imagine if, just for the sake of argument, any of these unbanked folks in countries you mentioned could install something like TransferWise (which app doesn’t matter, but the ability to tie your identity to your account holding various value stores) and hold whichever currency they wanted digitally. No stablecoin, CBDC, or blockchain required.

yyyk2• 3 years ago

A stablecoin that moves in line with inflation.

Who measures inflation? Why, the same central bankers crypto people inveigh against. This coin will give them a lovely arbitrage opportunity against all the holders.

stouset• 3 years ago

IMO we need financial alternatives. If you see what happened in Argentina, Turkey, Lebanon...people's life savings being stolen overnight.

And we see the same happen with cryptocurrencies with astonishing regularity.

throwaway02y• 3 years ago

life savings being stolen overnight.

Sounds like crypto to me.

JoshuaRogers• 3 years ago

Agreed. To make any real inroads, there needs to be a generally accepted use case that the existing systems don’t handle sufficiently well that crypto excels at.

That isn’t to say that the existing systems do things well, but the networking effect they have and the friction, risk, and learning curve of dealing with crypto tend to make it less fluid of the options.

Frankly, I’ve not heard of a use case that fits that description. It isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, but I don’t expect to see crypto regain its hyped status until that generally accepted case comes up.

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

What may save the crypto revolution is future bank failures. I think that’s where the public will discover its true utility.

GrumpyNl3• 3 years ago

With crypto comes ransomware, how would they pull that off without crypto?

CPLX2• 3 years ago

It’s worth noting that gambling and crime (of the evading money transfer restrictions variety not the stealing kind) are perfectly useful applications for a technology.

That’s all crypto has ever been and all it will be. But that’s pretty big. Gambling is one of the most enduring and appealing activities humans engage in. Lock people in a prison with only walls and cigarettes and they’ll figure out how to do it. People will populate an empty desert to do it.

So there’s that.

kmeisthax• 3 years ago

of the evading money transfer restrictions variety not the stealing kind

At least in the western world these are synonyms, and everywhere else it's still more often that the tech is used for theft than for authorized-but-illegal transactions. Irreversible, censorship-resistant transactions are like rocket fuel for cybercriminals.

rainsford• 3 years ago

You know what will save the crypto revolution? Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.

I think the problem is actually deeper than that. It's not just a lack of good use cases, cryptocurrency's fundamental design goals are things that most people not only don't care about but would actively try to avoid. An immutable financial ledger where you manage your own keys is actually a terrible solution for the average person, so you need a super compelling use case to make up for the downsides.

It can't just be an alternative to traditional finance. That's fine for people who are ideologically sold on the concept, but people who just want to go shopping or save money aren't going to find that super compelling. It has to do something way better that normal people actually care about. Really the best use case that's developed is cryptocurrency investing as a get rich quick scheme, but it's hard to see that as a sustainable model for any "revolution".

imacomputertoo2• 3 years ago

This seems like a very hostile and unreasonable take. People in developing countries have far greater need for access to financial services, banking and loans. rich countries have that already because they have stable governments. Poor countries don't. While crypto has its risks, the risks of unstable national currencies can be greater. So it's a reasonable decision to consider crypto in that context. People in rich countries have less need. For rich stable nations, crypto will have to offer more than simple services and better-than-Venezuela security.

balls187• 3 years ago

The developing world kept orkut going too.

im3w1l• 3 years ago

I went from being very positive about cryptocurrencies when they got started to being a bit disgusted the last few years as it seemed to be completely dominated by scams and get-rich-quick people. It's starting to feel like that is fading away, that the ecosystem is going back to basics and providing value to people again. Great to hear!

imacomputertoo2• 3 years ago

I went through a similar arch of sentiment since discovering crypto in about 2014. the field really is full of scams, but I think that's being cleared out. Bitcoin and Ethereum are emerging from that as legitimate projects. Still government regulation could squash them, or they might just fail, but if they were scams, I think they would have pulled the rug by now.

SeanAnderson2• 3 years ago

Just a reminder that there was an example of a company using blockchain to track inventory, admittedly in a pilot project, shared on HN just ten days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469811

Their reasons was: "If you are wondering about using a p-Chip instead of an RFID tag, the former boasts several advantages. According to the maker, p-Chip devices are smaller, cheaper (a few cents each), tougher, and more secure than nearest competitor RFID."

I don't claim to be sufficiently versed in these fields to critique, and I'm not trying to start an ideological war here, but I felt it important to highlight that legitimate companies in America continue to explore its use cases.

GrumpyNl3• 3 years ago

You should read the first comment on that article.

SeanAnderson2• 3 years ago

I read through the HackerNews discussion on the article before sharing. It still felt worthwhile to me to share this here. Please don't make assumptions in bad faith.

dale_glass6• 3 years ago

It seems to me that the actual relevant innovation has to do with a better chip than with the blockchain.

Ultimately, there's a single source of truth: whoever certifies the cheese to be authentic. And there's the requirement to shoot a laser at this thing. It's a device you have to physically interact with.

So this at best requires what, a standard cryptographic signature emitted by a trusted party? The blockchain part is complete fluff.

The main point of this seems to be that for a third party it's hard to obtain this very specific chip to insert into their non-authentic cheese, which is why they use a physical chip instead of printing a QR code on the rind. So that'd be what provides the benefit, not the blockchain.

Aunche• 3 years ago

Like with anything else with blockchain, the question is how that is any better than using centralized database. I don't even see any mention of a blockchain in the article.

inhumantsar• 3 years ago

Hyperledger is used by quite a few organisations, mainly to share data trustlessly. There are some interesting governance structures growing out of DAO contracts too.

These don't get talked about much because real-world use cases are often too boring to make for good internet arguments. Talk of scams and bubbles and grifts spreads much more easily.

addicted2• 3 years ago

These used to get talked about endlessly.

IBM built its entire blockchain business around the idea of logistics and ran expensive TV ads promoting the IBM blockchain for years.

The problem is that for all that was promised, in reality what we have are a few very specialized niche uses. The fundamental issue with the blockchain is that the case for a “trustless” database as opposed to outsourcing it to a single trustworthy are very limited. And the cases where the benefits outweigh the significant operational complexities are even more limited.

And that’s before you consider that 50%+1 attacks exist. So even the “trustless”ness is vulnerable to attacks.

foobarbazetc2• 3 years ago

Been in the Web3 space as a side hustle for something like 2 years now and the only real usecase I’ve seen is something like USDC transfers over Solana.

Everything else is just a scam and/or ponzi.

Add to that that the price of coins is manipulated by market makers and exchanges (CEX and DEX) and it’s not looking good, honestly.

Regulation would actually improve the space a lot. Something like a national ticker for coins would go a long way to clearing out a lot of the scum.

edkennedy• 3 years ago

Nationalize the Oracles (like Link) basically

mistrial9• 3 years ago

you are describing just parts of a larger, complicated system. Everything you say is true no doubt, but that is not all that is going on, in the entirety.

On the other side, six hundred years of modern finance with insurance and performance-based outcomes, have been leveraged with top-heavy monopoly players. In daily finance on a very large scale, industry companies use "trust" or credit-ratings, or regulatory capture even, to hold on to transaction flows with a lot of overhead.

The promise of automatable chains of transactions is a kind of no-boss, no-outsized fee "free market." The largest currency issuers of the world know this, and have been busily building their own, controlled versions.

You are wandering among flea-market stalls and wondering where the sense is, one might say.

bitcharmer• 3 years ago

What is Web3?

everfree13• 3 years ago

Technically speaking, it's a JavaScript library used for interacting with EVM blockchains.

Practically speaking, people use the term to mean just about whatever they want nowadays. Often it's used as a generic buzzword to sell products on some vague idea of a better, more equitable internet.

foobarbazetc2• 3 years ago

People use it as an all encompassing term for any blockchain using service or product.

https://cloud.google.com/web3

disqard• 3 years ago

It's a buzzword used to extract a big pile of money from VCs (before setting it on fire).

hanniabu8• 3 years ago

Like with all side hustle communities, you will mostly see scams and ponzis. This is also reflected by stating you use Solana. There are a lot of real usecases as can be seen here: https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/32b0f933618a3229efe3fbc01cb...

Regulation would actually improve the space a lot.

It's already illegal to scam people, what's needed is accountability.

Something like a national ticker for coins would go a long way to clearing out a lot of the scum.

Only insiders will get promoted

codezero3• 3 years ago

I recently started working for a web3 company - and I am a crypto skeptic, I joined because it was founded by two former coworkers who I enjoyed working with. We're a data SaaS in the space and even though it's a bear market, we're doing pretty well. There are a lot of real businesses building on top of various chains that aren't just scams/shady (though there are plenty of those too). Just the sheer amount of business activity I see on a daily basis that looks like the web2 SaaS work I did for the prior 8 years when it wasn't a bear market makes me pretty optimistic that eventually these businesses (and many others) will find sustainable ways to operate using blockchains, it's just going to take some time, it's still really early in the space.

At least on the Ethereum side of things, I see success being less about a particular crypto currency and more about how smart contracts and the underlying EVM layers evolve to operate decentralized applications at scale. It's still not something I think is guaranteed. I didn't think Linux was a guaranteed success when I worked at Red Hat in the 90s either, but it became more certain when we started selling services and put less focus on box sales.

mrtksn3• 3 years ago

Any examples of those non shady businesses with real products that real people are using for stuff beyond betting on some crypto assets?

hanniabu8• 3 years ago

Here's a list of some: https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/32b0f933618a3229efe3fbc01cb...

codezero3• 3 years ago

The answer is that it’s sparse. It’s still very early. Scammers and grifters were dominant on the Internet for decades, massive businesses were built on spam and popup ads, something every user universally hated.

I could give a few examples but I think it’s still at an early enough stage that they won’t appeal to the general public any more than internet chat did to the general public in the mid 90s. It’s still too early. It’s fine to ignore emerging tech that you find annoying or useless. I just tend to be attracted to it because it’s quite fun to be along for the ride to see it become more mainstream and useful. Not everything succeeds. :) prime example from my previous time in web2 SaaS: box subscription companies were a popular growth and acquisition model but ended up not being sustainably aligned with what people actually wanted: consistent and reliable products they love.

tornato7• 3 years ago

The biggest real use is right now is (IMO) USDC for payments. It's a much better experience than banking rails, from the cheap & instant settlements to the traceable accounting and programmable security controls.

latchkey5• 3 years ago

Let's not forget that last year ETH fulfilled a promise and switched from PoW to PoS. Effectively decimating the entire GPU PoW mining industry almost overnight. This reduced crypto power usage significantly. The developers executed open heart surgery on a multi billion $ patient with live coverage, and it went off pretty much without a hitch. The complaint is no longer if they can do something ground breaking, but when.

All the while, AI is also taking over. Businesses are slurping up power from everywhere, without any regard for the environment. We hear about companies purchasing 10,000 H100's, but we don't hear about how it is going to be powered. Nobody outside the industry is talking about the fact that you can't get any meaningful (>5MW) data center space in the US because it has all been taken. It isn't being taken for generating hashes that secure billions in value, but for generating images and content... I'm not sure which one is more wasteful.

dale_glass6• 3 years ago

The difference would be that AI's power usage is performing useful calculations, and that everyone involved wants to reduce the power usage. Nobody in AI likes paying big power bills. If somebody invents a chip that uses 10% of the power, the industry would gladly adopt it and decrease consumption by 90%.

This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto. We start with room sized monsters like ENIAC and improve and improve until something better fits in a solar powered watch.

latchkey5• 3 years ago

The difference would be that AI's power usage is performing useful calculations

Subjective.

Nobody in AI likes paying big power bills.

Nobody anywhere "likes" big power bills, including in crypto. That said for crypto, this actually had the effect of driving everyone to the lowest priced power sources on the planet (many of which ended up being 'green' energy) and building more efficient systems.

The fact of the matter is that AI is so hot right now that people are paying absurd rates for power and nobody is talking about the usage. Like I said above, datacenter demand is off the charts right now. They are announcing space on a Friday and it is gone by Monday.

This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto. We start with room sized monsters like ENIAC and improve and improve until something better fits in a solar powered watch.

"except for crypto" is wrong.

ETH started as an ENIAC and now it is a solar powered watch. In fact, ETH pegged itself to GPUs from the start, which meant that it didn't have the same sort of hardware competition that Bitcoin has. ETH's PoW algo is memory hard and limited by the onboard controller bandwidth, which meant that the fastest GPUs were not always the more ROI efficient... you didn't need to continuously upgrade the hardware to latest greatest.

everfree13• 3 years ago

AI's power usage is performing useful calculations

A lot of AI's power usage is going towards generating images, or writing fiction, or doing any number of other things that don't help people improve any kind of physical processes. That's not to get into the GPU usage of video games, which by every economic measure consist of entirely useless calculations. In both AI and crypto you can find people using the resources to perform "useful" and "not useful" calculations; it's all subjective and at the end of the day people have the right to run up their electricity bill on whatever they fancy.

If somebody invents a chip that uses 10% of the power, the industry would gladly adopt it and decrease consumption by 90%.

If someone created an invention that used 0.012% of the power to run a blockchain, many chains would gladly adopt it and decrease their energy consumption by 99.988%.

In fact that's exactly what Ethereum did, with its move from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Now, almost every new chain is PoS.

This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto.

Ethereum did it.

mellosouls• 3 years ago

It isn't being taken for generating hashes that secure billions in value, but for generating images and content... I'm not sure which one is more wasteful

Crypto. AI has actually proven useful.

latchkey5• 3 years ago

Dismissive. I know people who have found crypto useful.

Ethereum founder on U.S. crypto crackdown

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