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Entwickler

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Thank you for pushing back against the "crypto anywhere bad!" crowd. T

The USDC payments are pretty tame, and on the networks they have selected performance should be pretty quick and cheap too. For example, payments via ETH Polygon L2 is ~2 cents (https://l2fees.info/) and transaction time is also a couple seconds.

I personally am glad to see them reintroduce crypto now that its matured more for stable payment use cases.

"Proof of stake is not really any different to the fiat system it's trying to replace." Please elaborate.

"If a money isn't proof-of-work then it implies that some people can create it without doing work" Have you seen how much work goes into being a validator? There is definitely work being done - just much more sophisticated that guessing a random value...

Agreed on crypto not having the physical limitations and on the trend of fiat to inflate. I just can't agree on the other points.

Proof of work was the first of the consensus algorithms to be used with blockchains because Satoshi (imo, probably Hal Finney) likely didn't know about Proof of Stake at the time. By the time it was being discussed, Satoshi was already becoming less active in the community.

The claim PoS is not the best store of value is asinine. PoW in BTC has consolidated around a cabal of a handful of miners and the power usage is of course a well-known sounding bell for PoW apologists everywhere.

The truth is PoW was the best they had at the dawn of blockchain, then technology improved. It's really this simple and I'm baffled when people get religious about consensus algorithms. It's as if people would say we need to keep using bubblesort instead of quicksort because bubblesort was discovered first.

Crypto currencies are an experiment in the "denationalization of money" which was a book written by Hayek - of course he wrote this before cyrpto currencies were even a thing.

I would avoid just picking out BTC (which being stable in supply is prone to hoarding as digital gold and not really used as a means of commerce) and look at what other crypto has to offer as well, such as Ethereum which has a dynamic supply limit that is tied to its usage - in times of high usage such as today, it actually becomes deflationary. As usage slows, it becomes inflationary again which in theory should promote network usage.

We are essentially in an ongoing experiment of the denationalization of money and I personally think it will be fascinating how it will play out in the next couple decades.

You've never had to "verify the integrity of game cache" either? Wow, you must be lucky - 3-4 of the friends I play with have to do that quite often.

Funny enough, as we speak, I am downloading an update for a game. It failed for some unknown reason the first time and tried redownloading now. Time will tell if it will finally "just work" or if I'll have to redownload the entire game. Before you ask, yes I am on an SSD with plenty of space and I have a pretty decent fiber internet connection.

Bismarck’s War 3 years ago

This aligns with what I've read in Robert K Massie's "Dreadnought". It feels odd to title the book "Bismarck's War" and then come to that lesson. It should really have been titled "Wilhelm's Lunacy".

Wilhelm's obsession with a massive fleet to compete with England lost any hopes of forming an alliance with them and resulted in Germany being seen as a threat. Having a large fleet puts you at odds against England no matter what - that is their last line of defense. It's interesting to think what might have happened had Germany abandoned any aims on a massive navy and focused all those resources on it's army instead. My hunch is no mis-alignement with England and a very different looking world today if that happened.

Nowhere in the article does it mention NFTs being at the heart of the layoffs. The article later says, "The Ottawa-based company will cut jobs in all its divisions, though most of the layoffs will occur in recruiting, support and sales units, said Mr. Lütke".

No mention of NFTs, though wouldn't be surprised if they scale back on that. I _would_ be surprised if they drop support and development for them completely.

I would agree with a lot of this. On the flip side, there's the sayings "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." and "Wealth does not last beyond three generations".

I've anecdotally seen this where kids from rich parents take a lot of their wealth for granted and don't understand fully what it takes to build-up and retain wealth for the long-term. They usually get high-end jobs in society - CFO of company a dad started, doctor, lawyer, etc however it feels some depth to that wealth may have been lost...

In the case of Ethereum, I see it more as acknowledging it is a problem under Proof of Work and they are moving off it this year _because_ it's a problem. They are making tangible progress with the Kintsugi test net coming out last month.

How else are they supposed to address it other than acknowledging the problem, laying out a roadmap, and taking steps towards the end goal?

Could you: 1. Point me to the source that says, " if anyone ever holds more than ⅓ of the total supply (as is the case with Ethereum's founders currently holding 65% of the overall issuance, for example), they can indefinitely control the chain through their re-org capability." 2. Point me to the addresses of Ethereum's founders? Presumably it's then 65% of 115 million eth.

Would honestly love to see the details.

From https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html "A large mining pool publicly showing how they have internally distributed their nodes and network dependencies doesn't do much to calm community members scared of mining centralization. And pictures like these, showing 90% of Bitcoin hashpower at the time being capable of showing up to the same conference panel, do quite a bit to scare people".

If you follow the link, you'll see a picture of 7 people that controlled 90% of Bitcoin hashpower at the time. Remind me how that's more fair to an arbitrary holder of Bitcoin, than say, letting the holders have the power with staking?

"it is almost impossible to trace." I always struggle with this argument. Literally every tx is on the chain. Sure, they can obfuscate and make tracing more difficult, but the data is still there to be analyzed. At some point the user will likely try to receive the crptyo and cash out at an exchange, or purchase goods and services through a regulated entity like paypal. That's where the gov can scrutinize and take action, which is why KYC is in place at Coinbase and other US exchanges.

To curb nefarious use across borders, seems like the problem may be that more exchanges need KYC laws across the globe, not just in USA, and there would need to be some interpol-like oversight.

A globally public ledger seems like a tool, not a hindrance, against "Black Money". We just need more global cooperation and oversight between governments tracking the exchanges.