Ethereum is on the forefront of some of the hardest problems in distributed systems and security today. If anything, public blockchains have really pushed the edges of research in some of these spaces, particularly around consensus, crypto, and mechanism design.
Also in governance! Lot of research is now financed directly by grants from the Ethereum Foundation! That’s a game changer for researchers. I know a few people who were able to get grants for their research projects, without the need to pass by the traditional academics system (I mean, they are academics but didn’t have to play the usual academics politics game to be funded).
So instead they were able to get grants on the basis of....what? Knowing some key people involved with Ethereum? Telling a persuasive story on Twitter? Having the right buzzwords in their bio?
Sure, "the academics politics game" may often be an issue. But I don't see how "blockchain!" suddenly solves the problem of deciding where research funds should go in a better way.
I wonder if the pursuit of crypto is equivalent to our aspirations in space. We may not get to Mars but we'll learn a lot by attempting and will have valuable biproducts.
Of course there is a waste product as well and the pursuit holds some cost but it motivates people and that shouldn't be underestimated
NFTs are dumb for physical items. Who enforces the ownership? Ok so your NFT says you own it. So the centralized governmental police force has to ensure the actual NFT? Defeats the decentralized purpose lol.
NFTs are dumb mostly. Digital collector items, ok I get it
Precisely, there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority. At which point it's orders of magnitude easier and more efficient to use a centralized database.
I did some contract work with an Ethereum NFT startup several years ago (now defunct), before the recent hype, and the only "value" proposition was that they were selling "genuine" NFTs blessed by particular large consumer brands.
Behind the scenes it was all a centralized SQL server that only touched the blockchain when you exported your tokens to a private wallet because that was slow and expensive -- and turns out almost no one actually cared about that part. As long as you left your tokens in custodianship of the company, the company technically owned them as far as the blockchain was concerned.
And then even for digital goods where the concept of the "original" is meaningless when exact digital duplicates are zero-cost, just... who cares? What do even own, and why should anyone else respect your "ownership"?
All this NFT noise just feels like those scams where you "buy" a plot of land on the moon or name a star. No authoritative body in the world recognizes that claim, and if we ever start colonizing the moon you can be sure as shit that no entity is going to respect your "ownership".
It all feels very regressive in the face of decades of efforts of open source and work to liberalize things like copyrights and fair use in software and digital goods and services. Not to mention that it is an environmental disaster.
Someone I follow who is always right is big on them. Their argument is that people buy expensive and rare shit just to have it and project superiority.
Thus “owning” the HD Clíp of Lebron slam dunking is like cred they are willing to pay USD for.
> there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority
Not at all the case. All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. Direct communication with the fans is all that's needed, no central authority required.
Not all NFTs are created equal. Some have all the data necessary to reproduce the work of art embedded right on the blockchain, such as Euler Beats: https://eulerbeats.com/ . Others use IPFS hashes and embed the hashes on the NFT itself, so all you need is a single server in the world serving up that file and you can validate authenticity.
An NFT is sort of like a signed, autographed copy of something. Sure, I can have a reproduction of the Mona Lisa printed for about $50, but can I have the original canvas that Da Vinci himself painted on for $50? Of course not.
When I was a kid, I liked to collect baseball cards. I knew a mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card was exceedingly rare and valuable. A signed and rare card can go for tens of thousands or more dollars. Signed baseballs or gloves can also have additional value compared to the underlying physical item. What is it about the signature that changes the value of something? You know that the player themselves interacted with that item.
That is the case with NFTs. They won't be going away. You can try to mint a copy of an NFT, but it will always have a later timestamp than the first one, and it won't have the original block number, so it's quite easy to root out counterfeits.
I think about it as a post-modern art performance. The goal of NFTs is to deconstruct the concept of ownership. It’s absurd by design, and relies purely on faith, forcing us to consider its deep implication in our lives and societies.
I don’t know if I’m writing this as a joke or not :)
I think you are right on. The world is struggling to define what "digital ownership" means. Enter NFTs. I think they are here to stay as a baseline even after it bubbles up and pops.
Even NBA Topshot, the golden child of NFTs right now, is only useful when backed by NBA centralized infrastructure.
There's a _little_ value of decoupling the ownership from the centralized infra that controls the thing you own..but tbh it's not much different than an NFT for a physical trading card lol.
But even for digital collectors items, it still seems dumb to me. Digital things can be copied. There's nothing you can do to prevent copying the payload. And only outside legal authorities can enforce property rights, making the whole blockchain part of it redundant.
The real interesting NFTs are those that don't even try and pretend to have a claim to a real-world item. For example, you can currently buy an NFT for a destroyed Banksy piece (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banksy-nft-injective-destroy-ar...). I mean if this isn't evidence of a cryptomania I don't know what is. I think the most saddening part is that almost everyone pushing NFTs are pushing a get-rich-quick scheme, and trying to get as many un- or misinformed people in on the scam as possible. Lately I've seen relatives buying art NFTs thinking that they get some kind of ownership in a piece of digital artwork (and no, they don't get the copyright. That stays with the artist.)
Honestly, once Jack Dorsey sells his first tweet, he just sell it again. What's stopping him? He got 2.5MM for it one time and gets to keep ownership. Why not just keep selling an NFT to the fabled First Tweet and rake in the cash. This is clearly an irrational market and seeing how crazy it can get would be amazing.
Digital goods as NFTs have exactly the same problems as physical ones.
There was a case where someone stole a JPEG of someone else's art off their website, minted an NFT, and sold it, claiming to be the original artist. You still need a centralizing authority (like with NBA Top Shot) to ensure authenticity and prevent fraud.
The one maybe advantage I can see of decentralized is that the secondary market doesn't have to be governed by the rules of the centralizing authority. In other words, maybe the authority provides for the initial minting of the good (ensuring authenticity, which can subsequently be verified using the blockchain), but don't have to be involved in the secondary sales.
This isn't one case of stealing digital art. A lot of work is being scraped off of twitter causing artists to go into protected mode. I've been seeing a ton of hate for NFTs among artists.
There’s a massive forgery issue with physical items - Shoes, Fashion Brands, Art.
The benefit of NFT for psychical goods isn’t so much proving who the current owner is as much as it is proving the historical ownership so the authenticity of an item can be ensured. You don’t need a central government for this. For example, as long as you know Nikes address, I can confirm a shoe I want to buy is truly authentic by verifying that address is the original owner.
How do you attach a digital address to a physical item? Let’s say I buy a Nike shoe and then give 10 fake Nike shoes the same digital address. They are amazing fakes. Same issue as today right?
Unless there is a clever crossover to convert from digital verification to physical and back... seems worthless to me.
And if someone intercepts the shoe in transit and replaces it with a counterfeit, how does the token notice?
Nike could just publish a public key in an SEC filing and you could use that to verify that you're actually talking to the company. That would be exactly as good and much simpler.
Concur, NFTs are only good for digital assets, which was the driving rationale behind Ethereum in the first place (a distributed place to capture digital assets so that one party could not unilaterally decide to modify or delete them).
Vitalik says that layer 1 optimisations can enable a scaling up by a factor of 100 and layer 2 optimisations by another factor of 100. Does anyone know where the evidence to support these claims is? And if scaling up by these huge factors is possible then why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already. I understand that zero knowledge proofs involve a huge amount of complex maths but I didn't think they actually enable a scaling up as they need huge amounts of data in the proof and massive computation.
Vitalik actually has an excellent blog post on rollups. [1]
As well as the Rollup Centric Roadmap posted last year which is a little more technically specific[2]. All the evidence/math is there to read, or in the developer forums.
Currently Ethereum has 15 transactions per second. Optimistic rollups can rollup 200 or so transactions per second into each ethereum transaction. Optimistic rollups are launching onto mainnet this month after successful testing for the past few months[3]. So straight away with ORs we can hit 3000tps. Then on top of that general purpose zk-rollups aren't far behind [4][5] and they can get into the thousands of tsp themselves.
Once we get data sharding on layer 1 this amplifies the number of rollup transactions we can handle pushing us up to ~100000tps (a combination of increasing how much the main layer 1 chain can handle, and this multiplying with the rollups). And then there is computation sharding further down the line which will push it up again.
This has taken so long and hasn't been seen before simply because nobody knew how to do it! The researchers have spent the past 5 years intensely working on it. But its actually starting to happen, and this month too! Which is pretty wild for those of use who've been working on it along the way, lots of previously unfeasible and expensive applications are suddenly going to be possible and cheap.
We scale up with rollups this year, then move onto a full Proof of Stake network (not DelegatedPos)early next year, finally ditching energy inefficient PoW to everyones relief, and we have a much greener, better distributed, easy to participate in, scaleable for mainstream use, beautiful ledger.
The first blog post only seems to suggest a 10 times speed up.
"A simple Ethereum transaction (to send ETH) takes ~110 bytes. An ETH transfer on a rollup, however, takes only ~12 bytes"
But the 12 byte number makes some assumptions that will probably not be true or only be true if many transactions are made by the same addresses.
Computationally there didn't appear to be any scaling since checks still need to be made by someone and verified by other nodes that fraudulent transactions aren't in a roll up.
> why haven't we seen them be successfully implemented already
They require cutting edge cryptographic and blockchain research and development which has only recently been achieved. Many teams are racing to solve this because there is a fortune to be made for whoever does. So probably these developments will be delivered no later than possibly can be.
So i have a pretty clear view of how bitcoin operates, but what i don't understand about ETH is the description of it being a generalized protocol, or a "world computer". They talk about dns or messenger accounts, etc, but is all this data stored on the blockchain? How does the size not balloon out of control?
It does balloon and has already ballooned. There's company called Infura that hosts most of Ethereum full nodes. Because of this, the system is quite fragile and not properly decentralized. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastru...
You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by improving light clients.)
Now if you want an archive node, that will use a lot more space. But a full node already has the entire transaction history and entire current state. An archive node adds the ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how much of this token did that address own in block number X last year."
If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical queries there's no need for it.
The world computer idea does help to understand it. If you are playing a game or running some other processes on your discrete computer sometimes you accidentally pin the CPU, RAM, and IO, then you’ll run into issues where copying files to a USB disk or even doing simple things like editing cells in Excel becomes next to impossible until you force quit some applications.
In the “world computer” known as Ethereum, operations are prioritized via “gas” payments in ETH. A bunch of people you don’t know on the other side of the world might get interested in trading drawings of cats with each other[1], and suddenly the “world computer” has no resources available, and the cost of inserting simple records into the “world database”, or moving some tokens to an exchange suddenly goes from $2 to $50, or $500. This can happen right in the middle of an operation so you have to be careful to consult “gas prices” and probably the I Ching wouldn’t hurt, and then kind of make a guess and hope your transaction doesn’t get stranded.
If you have some tokens you want to get out of your wallet and you don’t have any ETH in the wallet to pay for the transaction you may need to beg, borrow, or steal some, and you’ll almost certainly be left with some dollars worth in your wallet that you may never be able to empty completely.
Imagine what it would have been like to work on a big timeshare mainframe in the sixties where booking time to do simple things cost massive sums of money, except that the bids for resources can come in from all over the world and things are being repriced constantly.
People like to call this decentralized, because no one is in control, but it actually centralizes the allocation of resources in a way that makes things many multiple times more expensive than they should be.
[1] The “world computer” is not actually trading images, because that would be impossible given its limited compute resources, so all of the hard stuff like transmitting or decoding a gif is actually happening on the normal internet and discrete computers. The “world computer” is just spending tonnes of resources recording which user currently “owns” the cat via a database entry.
Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking: This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade. Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating gas fees.
On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into, scalability has been the main point of research for the past 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see improvements over the next few months and the rest of the year leading up to pos.
On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger, but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now, but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there is significant demand for that security.
The decentralisation is about resilience of the system, security of the information, and transparency (but not surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc) but we can try create systems that allow people to work together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out from under them when they need it. There are payment networks for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt for your own community, there are quadratic funding mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there is good work being done to actually help people. CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me over. That is valuable to me.
Full nodes are around 500GB, so they do fill up faster than bitcoin does. Archive nodes are bigger, but you can get everything in an archive node from a full node as it contains all the proofs. There are other data pruning techniques, and lots of work being done on light clients for eth2 (so you could connect via a light client running inside an app on your phone, rather than the app connecting to infura/alchemy).
Though contrary to what people think about this being a weakness for ethereum, there are still ~10000 nodes running, so pretty close to the amount bitcoin has.
I am going to stake eth 2.0 in hopes that it and other POS coins can provide an alternative to POW (despite any security or other technical shortcomings). And then if prices of POS coins can be made stable, perhaps by the use of synthetic baskets of POS coins, they could achieve some utility beyond hoarding
There are services like Lido which is live, and RocketPool which is launching soon. You can essentially just buy lido staked ether (steth) on uniswap, steth is a token which represents staked ethereum and accrues interest via rebasing.
RocketPool would be the preferred method once it is live as it maintains the decentralised ethos letting people run rocketpool nodes and anyone pool any amount they want, like how mining pools work today (except running on a raspberry pi, rather than maxing out gpus).
Readit News
Sure, "the academics politics game" may often be an issue. But I don't see how "blockchain!" suddenly solves the problem of deciding where research funds should go in a better way.
Of course there is a waste product as well and the pursuit holds some cost but it motivates people and that shouldn't be underestimated
NFTs are dumb mostly. Digital collector items, ok I get it
I did some contract work with an Ethereum NFT startup several years ago (now defunct), before the recent hype, and the only "value" proposition was that they were selling "genuine" NFTs blessed by particular large consumer brands.
Behind the scenes it was all a centralized SQL server that only touched the blockchain when you exported your tokens to a private wallet because that was slow and expensive -- and turns out almost no one actually cared about that part. As long as you left your tokens in custodianship of the company, the company technically owned them as far as the blockchain was concerned.
And then even for digital goods where the concept of the "original" is meaningless when exact digital duplicates are zero-cost, just... who cares? What do even own, and why should anyone else respect your "ownership"?
All this NFT noise just feels like those scams where you "buy" a plot of land on the moon or name a star. No authoritative body in the world recognizes that claim, and if we ever start colonizing the moon you can be sure as shit that no entity is going to respect your "ownership".
It all feels very regressive in the face of decades of efforts of open source and work to liberalize things like copyrights and fair use in software and digital goods and services. Not to mention that it is an environmental disaster.
Someone I follow who is always right is big on them. Their argument is that people buy expensive and rare shit just to have it and project superiority.
Thus “owning” the HD Clíp of Lebron slam dunking is like cred they are willing to pay USD for.
Not at all the case. All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. Direct communication with the fans is all that's needed, no central authority required.
Not all NFTs are created equal. Some have all the data necessary to reproduce the work of art embedded right on the blockchain, such as Euler Beats: https://eulerbeats.com/ . Others use IPFS hashes and embed the hashes on the NFT itself, so all you need is a single server in the world serving up that file and you can validate authenticity.
An NFT is sort of like a signed, autographed copy of something. Sure, I can have a reproduction of the Mona Lisa printed for about $50, but can I have the original canvas that Da Vinci himself painted on for $50? Of course not.
When I was a kid, I liked to collect baseball cards. I knew a mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card was exceedingly rare and valuable. A signed and rare card can go for tens of thousands or more dollars. Signed baseballs or gloves can also have additional value compared to the underlying physical item. What is it about the signature that changes the value of something? You know that the player themselves interacted with that item.
That is the case with NFTs. They won't be going away. You can try to mint a copy of an NFT, but it will always have a later timestamp than the first one, and it won't have the original block number, so it's quite easy to root out counterfeits.
I don’t know if I’m writing this as a joke or not :)
Even NBA Topshot, the golden child of NFTs right now, is only useful when backed by NBA centralized infrastructure.
There's a _little_ value of decoupling the ownership from the centralized infra that controls the thing you own..but tbh it's not much different than an NFT for a physical trading card lol.
Honestly, once Jack Dorsey sells his first tweet, he just sell it again. What's stopping him? He got 2.5MM for it one time and gets to keep ownership. Why not just keep selling an NFT to the fabled First Tweet and rake in the cash. This is clearly an irrational market and seeing how crazy it can get would be amazing.
There was a case where someone stole a JPEG of someone else's art off their website, minted an NFT, and sold it, claiming to be the original artist. You still need a centralizing authority (like with NBA Top Shot) to ensure authenticity and prevent fraud.
The one maybe advantage I can see of decentralized is that the secondary market doesn't have to be governed by the rules of the centralizing authority. In other words, maybe the authority provides for the initial minting of the good (ensuring authenticity, which can subsequently be verified using the blockchain), but don't have to be involved in the secondary sales.
The benefit of NFT for psychical goods isn’t so much proving who the current owner is as much as it is proving the historical ownership so the authenticity of an item can be ensured. You don’t need a central government for this. For example, as long as you know Nikes address, I can confirm a shoe I want to buy is truly authentic by verifying that address is the original owner.
Unless there is a clever crossover to convert from digital verification to physical and back... seems worthless to me.
Nike could just publish a public key in an SEC filing and you could use that to verify that you're actually talking to the company. That would be exactly as good and much simpler.
Currently Ethereum has 15 transactions per second. Optimistic rollups can rollup 200 or so transactions per second into each ethereum transaction. Optimistic rollups are launching onto mainnet this month after successful testing for the past few months[3]. So straight away with ORs we can hit 3000tps. Then on top of that general purpose zk-rollups aren't far behind [4][5] and they can get into the thousands of tsp themselves.
Once we get data sharding on layer 1 this amplifies the number of rollup transactions we can handle pushing us up to ~100000tps (a combination of increasing how much the main layer 1 chain can handle, and this multiplying with the rollups). And then there is computation sharding further down the line which will push it up again.
This has taken so long and hasn't been seen before simply because nobody knew how to do it! The researchers have spent the past 5 years intensely working on it. But its actually starting to happen, and this month too! Which is pretty wild for those of use who've been working on it along the way, lots of previously unfeasible and expensive applications are suddenly going to be possible and cheap.
We scale up with rollups this year, then move onto a full Proof of Stake network (not DelegatedPos)early next year, finally ditching energy inefficient PoW to everyones relief, and we have a much greener, better distributed, easy to participate in, scaleable for mainstream use, beautiful ledger.
[1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html [2] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r... [3] https://optimismpbc.medium.com/ [4] https://aztec.network/ [5] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/
"A simple Ethereum transaction (to send ETH) takes ~110 bytes. An ETH transfer on a rollup, however, takes only ~12 bytes"
But the 12 byte number makes some assumptions that will probably not be true or only be true if many transactions are made by the same addresses.
Computationally there didn't appear to be any scaling since checks still need to be made by someone and verified by other nodes that fraudulent transactions aren't in a roll up.
They require cutting edge cryptographic and blockchain research and development which has only recently been achieved. Many teams are racing to solve this because there is a fortune to be made for whoever does. So probably these developments will be delivered no later than possibly can be.
https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault
You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by improving light clients.)
Now if you want an archive node, that will use a lot more space. But a full node already has the entire transaction history and entire current state. An archive node adds the ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how much of this token did that address own in block number X last year."
If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical queries there's no need for it.
In the “world computer” known as Ethereum, operations are prioritized via “gas” payments in ETH. A bunch of people you don’t know on the other side of the world might get interested in trading drawings of cats with each other[1], and suddenly the “world computer” has no resources available, and the cost of inserting simple records into the “world database”, or moving some tokens to an exchange suddenly goes from $2 to $50, or $500. This can happen right in the middle of an operation so you have to be careful to consult “gas prices” and probably the I Ching wouldn’t hurt, and then kind of make a guess and hope your transaction doesn’t get stranded.
If you have some tokens you want to get out of your wallet and you don’t have any ETH in the wallet to pay for the transaction you may need to beg, borrow, or steal some, and you’ll almost certainly be left with some dollars worth in your wallet that you may never be able to empty completely.
Imagine what it would have been like to work on a big timeshare mainframe in the sixties where booking time to do simple things cost massive sums of money, except that the bids for resources can come in from all over the world and things are being repriced constantly.
People like to call this decentralized, because no one is in control, but it actually centralizes the allocation of resources in a way that makes things many multiple times more expensive than they should be.
[1] The “world computer” is not actually trading images, because that would be impossible given its limited compute resources, so all of the hard stuff like transmitting or decoding a gif is actually happening on the normal internet and discrete computers. The “world computer” is just spending tonnes of resources recording which user currently “owns” the cat via a database entry.
Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking: This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade. Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating gas fees.
On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into, scalability has been the main point of research for the past 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see improvements over the next few months and the rest of the year leading up to pos.
On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger, but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now, but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there is significant demand for that security.
The decentralisation is about resilience of the system, security of the information, and transparency (but not surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc) but we can try create systems that allow people to work together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out from under them when they need it. There are payment networks for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt for your own community, there are quadratic funding mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there is good work being done to actually help people. CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me over. That is valuable to me.
Though contrary to what people think about this being a weakness for ethereum, there are still ~10000 nodes running, so pretty close to the amount bitcoin has.
Its an area under active research though.
for example NFT metadata/data is often stored in IPFS & only linked to from the contract.
but confusingly some people still call data stored on IPFS "on-chain data".
It does, which is why they are looking into scaling solutions (sharding, layer 2 solutions, etc).
RocketPool would be the preferred method once it is live as it maintains the decentralised ethos letting people run rocketpool nodes and anyone pool any amount they want, like how mining pools work today (except running on a raspberry pi, rather than maxing out gpus).