Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others. Saying stuff like "supply chain apps" is a key application at the same time global supply chain apps on the blockchain are getting shutdown. The only use case of blockchain is coins and those are merely unregulated pump-and-dump. Bitcoin was an interesting thought experiment but the probably is that you need it to be profitable for individual miners (minus pools) to drive true decentralization and as soon as that is true, economies of scale will win and there will be a drive to centralization.
> Vitalik is a clearly a smart guy but I don't get this "All solvable problems" mindset of him and others.
It comes from a techno-optimist perspective that attempts should still be made to see if it could be solved in the first place. The binary alternative is a nihilistic "don't ever try" mindset, wherein the Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, & Joseph Fourier shouldn't ever try to solve existing problems, and that they should just toil in misery like the rest of us.
There definitely exists gradients in between the two, but it's worrying that HN, a supposed place of hackers/experimentalists, is adopting a more "this'll never work" stance over time. The Dropbox negativity was the popular start of this downtrend, & I fear it's getting worse.
I only joined HN a couple years ago (I've been working in tech for 12 years). I also find HN to be a bit depressing and pessimistic.
It's like there is some sort of "I tried that and it didn't work, so no one should ever try it again and if you do I'll warn you and then ridicule you for wasting your time" attitude that permeates all of some people's contributions to the discussion. This attitude isn't just at the individual level but also at the team, company, societal levels.
This doesn't feel like a hacker mindset to me at all. It feels increasing defeatist.
While I can't point to HN glory days (I wasn't here), I imagine that HN is devolving from hacker news to defeatist expert news.
But maybe it's society as a whole? I don't know...
What I can say is that the real hackers (eg builders, not speculators) in the web3 communities seem to be more optimistic than the average interaction I see here.
Another topic constantly seeing scorn is Kubernetes. This place has been over negative towards k8s since I have known about it, and yet it is getting bigger and better. The same reasons apply, we don't know it get it outta here.
I think most people concerns about crypto is either the scam (of other people) or the potential displacement of the system they are part of (which will cause its fall and a loss to them/it's a zero-sum game). Both of these are valid concerns.
What I am wondering, however, is if this scamming/pumping money will eventually make a legitimate industry. Many industries/technologies have started out of that (Military, Gambling, Sex, etc...)
I don't see how privacy can ever be solved with blockchain. By design, everything you ever do is permanently out in the open for ever and ever for anyone to not only see what you did, but mathematically prove that it was you (well, your key at least) that did it.
Sure you can be "anonymous" when using your wallet etc, but as we all know it is usually trivial to de-anonymize large data sets. Likewise, being anonymous when using a wallet then removes a lot of the perceived value of using it for identity verification (e.g. sign-ins, proof of humanity etc).
Basically you can make transactions anonymous using much the same kind of protection as you have between public and private keys. There is a proof the transaction is valid but that is basically all you can see.
I confess I possess only a shallow understanding of ZK rollups - can anyone explain how you can have an opaque proof that transactions are valid and still solve double-spending problems?
This is a rust based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) example.
That is to say, you can encrypt two numbers, do a mathematical calculation on them without decrypting them, and then, only the person with the private key can decrypt the result to get the value.
If you add something like FHE to blockchains (it's coming) then you can get anonymous transactions on the blockchain directly.
By the way, Zero knowledge proofs are not what is needed to get anonymous transactions. When you use ZK, you are issuing the proof AND have knowledge of the inputs. The prover needs to know the inputs, but does not need to reveal them to the verifier (which happens on chain). This means the transaction can assert that the mathematical operation occurred without doubt, but when you need to get at the numbers, you are back to a transparent value on the chain.
>When you use ZK, you are issuing the proof AND have knowledge of the inputs. The prover needs to know the inputs, but does not need to reveal them to the verifier (which happens on chain).
Can you elaborate more on this? What is this a ZKP proof for? That the transaction is valid?
Also from all the ZKP examples I've seen in crypto[graphy] class, soundness relies on the ability to repeat the process again and again. How does this work for the blockchain case where it seems like there's only one round of communication between prover/verifier?
A reply you got already mentioned zk functions, which is the best answer (cool tidbit, Avalanche's custom VM allows you to build these functions and anything else you want as precompiled code. More gas efficient.)
My second reply would be a hybrid system. I've been tossing around this idea in my head for what I call a decentralized PBM. At first I struggled with the privacy idea. Then I had the realization that it was unnecessary to bring PHI on chain. I could accomplish all the stuff that would benefit from a chain without it.
You can realize a lot of value from blockchains even if you're not purely decentralized.
It is not a very impressive list of future technologies for the year 2022, unfortunately. I don't mean this as shade: I just mean that most of these are older ideas that have either been deployed or attempted (with limited success.)
Clearly money and DeFi are already real and well-established things, whether they're "going great" is in the eye of the beholder. DAOs have been around for a while, and the main examples Vitalik lists are basically DeFi apps that call themselves DAOs. General-purpose DAOs that have real-world influence remain questionable things, mostly because they have too many human and legal dependencies. On-chain identity might be exciting. NFTs might eventually prove to have exciting real applications beyond apes. Blockchain voting remains an old idea that doesn't have much real benefit outside of DeFi project governance.
Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. "Proof of humanity" in theory is cool, but humans can be bought. Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. Even if unique brain patterns becomes the decentralization key, nothing stops two unique people from colluding and voting in the same direction. Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person.
I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.
You missed the point -- proof of stake is more likely to become centralized than proof of work since now you don't have to buy computers to own the network, you simply buy the coin. It's much easier to acquire a million ETH than it is to acquire and manage the equivalent value in computers. Even accounting for liquidity problems in acquiring ETH, the supply problems for hundreds of thousands of computers are probably worse. My point is even stronger with pseudo-centralized consensus like proof of stake.
The hard reality though is that ASICs are coming back to ETH (Vitalik has hinted at it in his own posts [0]) and at the end of the day, ETH needs compute.
> Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe. "Proof of humanity" in theory is cool, but humans can be bought. Power will always tend to centralization when money exists. It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control. Even if unique brain patterns becomes the decentralization key, nothing stops two unique people from colluding and voting in the same direction. Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person.
> I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.
----------
> Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe.
> Power will always tend to centralization when money exists.
> It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control.
> Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person.
> Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization.
> This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it.
> There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.
The parent comment is likely right, but it's engaging in a "it's not 100% perfect, so it's useless" fallacy: Just because we can't get 100% of the way there doesn't mean that the effort shouldn't be done in the first place.
The Bittorrent protocol is a good example of this, as the protocol's not perfect either, relying on centralized trackers for fast peering. Still, that didn't mean that the protocol couldn't improve, with Mainline DHT eventually being developed for the protocol. Even though it's still slower than a centralized tracker, it does its assigned job well & to great success.
Were such a viewpoint to be transplanted towards the Bittorrent protocol before DHT's creation, the parent would've likely viewed trackers to be "un-decentralizable" & therefore a waste of time. Attempts at decentralizing trackers would've been seen as a futile effort, as "they'll never be as efficient as centralized trackers".
In general, no working system is ever 100% perfect, so why is such an attitude still being projected upon all open-source projects?
It's likely that 100% decentralization will never be achieved, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't aim for at least 50%. The alternative is a nihilistic "we'll always need centralization" dystopia, & that fundamentally doesn't sit well with me all.
I never once said it was useless, I said decentralization is a great myth of the modern times. Blockchain technology could be useful even if decentralization is a facade.
We're building on Ethereum. Live projects for customers for 18 months.
The product is an NFT which gives you legal ownership of an underlying physical object when you buy it. An individually numbered bar of gold in a vault. A scarce collectible. Real estate.
The real estate thing is interesting: transfer time goes down from around 4 months in the UK to a couple of days. The only delay is the KYCAMLCTFPEPOFACT checking: if that's done as a pre-clearing step the transfer of real estate will be instantaneous. It took several years to build this capability.
I know inflation is bad, but £7000 to £1.9M is an impressive increase in value, for a piece of scrubby beach that looks impossible to get planning permission for.
As much as I always liked the idea of a more frictionless system for the transfer of asset ownership, I still have too many open questions on the integration with the legal system of the participants.
Say you have the NFT that claims ownership of a house. Now the local court allocates half of the house to your ex-husband whom you’ve just divorced. How is this (exemplary) case handled on the chain? How is any repossession through local legal system? Who gets to own the house should the private key be lost?
The answer to most of these questions is usually (I do not know your solution) some centralized entity that is introduced somewhere in the chain.
This may have come of as an attack, but be assured that I am genuinely curious whether a solution has been found that I am not aware of.
7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995 and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what has occurred.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales.
9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.
(quote ends)
Point being none of this is happening outside of the framework of law: transfer of ownership is the objective of the system. If you're legal owner of the house and a court takes half of it off you, the legal package around the NFT kicks in, breaks the tie between the NFT and the land (yes, there's an authoritative way of indicating this) and you then figure out what to do with the remaining property rights.
When dealing with land, the legal system is always primary.
What would happen if somebody used any kind of exploit to obtain the NFT? Could I as the new owner of the NFT just go to the local police, show the NFT in my wallet, and demand for the previous owner to be removed from it?
What happens if the person who owns the NFT dies without passing on the access to their wallet to anybody? Is the idea that this chunk of land is now eternally owned by a dead person? Would you expect the local law to comply with that?
In all these instances, the answer is litigation under the terms of service which are associated with the NFT or the warranty contracts which guarantee the status of the property.
You bring a case under those terms: "I am the legal owner of this land and I want the NFT which was owned by the deceased to be reissued to me". The legal binding on the original NFT is broken, and a new NFT is issued.
There's also provision under the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce digital dispute resolution rules https://lawtechuk.io/explore/ukjt-digital-disputes-rules to have an arbitrator use a judicial back door in the NFT contract to transfer ownership of the NFT if the contract has those affordances.
Since other people are asking similar questions, I will follow up with some specific questions rooted in my ignorance of the UK property system (I am in the USA).
Are you saying that in the UK it takes 4 months to transfer ownership of a gold bar or a collectible item? Do real estate transactions really take 4 months in the UK? Do you know if there are many other countries where ownership transfer is similarly cumbersome?
It can take many months to do a real estate transfer in many countries: in the UK it can be anywhere from a couple of months to a year.
Its not a fast system, basically the seller and the buyers lawyers have to mutually verify the sale is legal etc etc (that the seller actually can sell the property, that its not encumbered by a mortgage or such, etc). Buyer needs proof of funds, etc.
Pre-clearing the property and potential buyers can cut this time to days or hours.
1. What happens if a user loses their private key linked to an NFT, and this NFT is then transferred to another private key? Who owns the property then?
2. first: simultaneous atomic execution of a stack of legal contracts (six is the most we have done) as a single atomic unit, with payment and proof of signing as part of the system.
Also there's no other way of doing an e-commerce style purchase for something which is too expensive to pay for using a credit card. You can't buy land using Apple Pay.
1. See the above answer about somebody dying and leaving the NFT behind. Basically the NFT is stripped of its legal meaning, and then a clean NFT is reissued. You need a legal dispute raised before this can be ordered by a court, and that's the only situation under which it occurs.
The physical objects are protected from this by being held by independent custodians (for vaulted assets like gold) or SPVs (for things like land) generally speaking.
If we can't figure out how to prevent this for a given asset, we don't touch that asset.
Unless you sign a real contract in the real world moving the ownership of said gold bar from you to me, all your NFT is is a very expensive piece of paper that says "pinky promise it's yours" while the bank holding it has it filed under "Mattereum", and it's all that matters. I can't go there and pull it out of the vault, without you being there.
NFTs are worthless, unless you have official ownership of the thing. And if that's the case, then why the hell would I use an NFT ?
Having bought and sold property in the UK and comparing it to Sweden, for example, then I can only say that the UK process is archaic and incredibly cumbersome. So this is a very interesting place to improve the process. If you can get the legal process to stick and not end up with some edgecase situations where people end up losing their right to the property, this I think could be of real value to the UK.
Disclosure: I have known @leashless since way before Ethereum.
Yes! The key here is the failover to English Common Law: if something breaks the failover is binding arbitration with a technically sophisticated arbitrator who will come in, figure out who owns what, make the awards, job done. Obviously that's minimal protection if (for example) somebody has their cryptocurrency stolen and it's just gone - but ownership of the physical property isn't subject to those kinds of misfortunes. It's 100% under law, as you would expect!
If there's a system in the UK that is slow, and a system in Sweden that is fast, why is blockchain / crypto / smart contracts etc. the solution to the UK's slow system instead of whatever Sweden is doing -- since whatever Sweden is doing is working?
On the one hand, reducing the time it takes to buy or sell a house is a great thing.
But on the other, there’s a lot of due diligence that is appropriate to carry out as a purchaser that doesn’t seem covered and it’s unclear that the NFT or blockchain adds anything to the picture - the value-add here is in having done the searches ahead of time.
And making a properly binding handling of the liabity is absolutely key to being able to do those searches ahead of time. And that requires record keeping, proofs of payment, lots of document handling, simultaneous execution of a pile of different contracts, and so on.
It's actually a pretty good use case for the blockchain. It solves real problems here. Obviously it's not as sophisticated as systems that have been in use for 10 years, but it's a lot better than some of the archaic systems which still cleave to norms which have been in place for centuries.
As I don't know how it works in the UK: is there no registry where ownership of land is being held or can that already be edited/updated in real time to transfer real estate?
> transfer time goes down from around 4 months in the UK to a couple of days
I've got no idea what the fuck they are doing in the UK, but when I bought a house in the US my deed transfer was processed by the county in about six hours.
The actual official government registry part of the process is negligible.
What takes the time is lawyers talking to each other about god knows what, for months on end, for no apparent reason. My last house sale in the UK took about 4 months to go through. I am glad I don’t live there any more.
Proven is always a strong word. But they're https://lawtechuk.io/explore/ukjt-digital-disputes-rules integrated into legal contracts using this rule set and that's well understood. There's no real problem with smart contracts under English law: there's clear evidence of intent to form an agreement, a payment is made etc. It's pretty uncontroversial.
> The real estate thing is interesting: transfer time goes down from around 4 months in the UK to a couple of days. The only delay is the KYCAMLCTFPEPOFACT checking: if that's done as a pre-clearing step the transfer of real estate will be instantaneous. It took several years to build this capability.
So. The delay is still there, you still need KYC and other checks. The speed up is due to transfering paper records to a digital system, and has nothing to do with blockchain.
But sure. "NFTs and Blockchain" something something.
Good grief. In a backwards country of Moldova (where I'm from) property transfers (and other transfers like changing car ownership etc.) are instantaneous and don't need NFTs, blockchains or Ethereum. Go figure, must be happening by magic.
Sure. But in vast tracts of the world - UK, US, many other jurisdictions in the G20, and even more in poorer countries - land registers are a mess and transfers are hard.
The overhaul to get the Netherlands to that point took about 10 years, if I recall - I saw a talk by a team from your Land Registry talking about scanning goat hide parchments in Old Dutch into the property rights database!
Buying an NFT cannot legally give me land. That's reality. The NFT and crypto provides 0 value over just a normal contract. In fact, if the system worked the way you pretend it does, that would be even worse. If you defrauded me by lying about the realities of the property, I would have no recourse to be made whole.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a coffee shop around here that accepts ETH. I’m sure there’s a significant number of individuals that would know how to accept a crypto payment, but shops, small businesses, that have accounting requirements… I’m skeptical.
Awesome. Now my coffee is available at a random cost. If I just forgo the coffee it's cloth in crypto tomorrow might be able to buy me a PS5. What a wonderful system!
Haven’t you heard? According to my deep crypto friends, ETH is not meant for transactions. It’s the security and trust of ETH as an L1 that matters, and you should be using <random> L2 coin with ZK rollups instead!
> many new applications have limited use today due to limitations in tech
The Ethereum foundation has been focusing on technical problems since its inception, and your conclusion has always been the official motto: once we solve the "technical problems", users will come. But there will always be technical problems, and as each year passes with still no meaningful democratization of this tech, it's becoming doubtful that these limitations are the real issue.
Applications such as decentralized finance are only as interesting as the tokens they allow users to trade, but in turn these tokens are either shady (the world of FTT, USDT, etc.) or legal (requiring KYC, AML, etc.) so just like traditional finance. Once the former have fallen enough in disgrace, it's unclear what benefit there is to trade the latter (centralized tokens) on decentralized platforms.
It's easy to stack layers of abstractions, thinking the next one will be the one gathering users, and focusing on what we think is the last technical hurdle before mass adoption. After the 3rd or 4th iteration, one could start asking: what makes you think it'll make a difference this time?
Not much has changed since ICOs: same kind of ambitious claims with very little to show for it years after.
The argument that use cases aren't developing is quite brittle when you dig into it a bit.
Take the use case of global stablecoin transfers. The ability to send cash point-to-point anywhere in the world is obviously valuable and novel.
But for global stablecoin transfers to be generally useful 1) everybody needs crypto wallets, 2) crypto wallets need to be increasingly safe and easy to use, 3) transaction fees need to be sufficiently low, 4) stablecoin on/off-ramps to integration with the traditional financial system must be widely available, and 5) stablecoins in a variety of popular global currencies must be available and liquid.
The industry has made progress in all five of the above areas in the past few years, and so good progress has been made on the greater goal of generally available point-to-point global cash transfers. Saying crypto "has no use cases" is lazy, uncurious, and intellectually bankrupt.
The problem is that Ethereum continues to be used almost exclusively for speculation of ethereum, followed by creation of literally hundreds of thousands of ERC20 cryptocurrencies, followed by anonymous lotteries/gambling (and for a brief time NFTs which themselves were a form of speculation, although that's mostly collapsed). At what point will that change? How much more do they have to do before Ethereum is mainly used for real-world applications? Ethereum is a solution shoe-horned into a trustless blockchain to an already solved problem.
> Take the use case of global stablecoin transfers. The ability to send cash point-to-point anywhere in the world is obviously valuable and novel.
You're not sending "cash" though, you're most likely sending USDT or some other centralized stablecoin backed by a shady company ("stablecoin" is a very misleading term in this context given the counterparty risk). That's one point about trust being moved instead of removed, you need to trust the issuer to some extent. To this day I still haven't heard of a centralized stablecoin being fully audited, you merely get attestations, meaning that you can't treat them as "cash", you have a big risk just holding them.
Transferring / converting currencies from most countries to most other countries is easy and way cheaper via centralized means, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_(company) has been around for 11 years and was probably not first, and the fees are lower than what a blockchain transaction on BTC/ETH would cost. This is not even an apple to apple comparison, since in most cases you still need to convert your USDT back to USD to actually use them, incurring more fees in the process.
What ETH does allow you to do which you can't do with Wise and others is sending USDT without censorship. That's probably the best way to bypass US regulations if you want to send USD where the US government doesn't want you to. And some people suggest that this is how things should be, which is an interesting point. Whether you agree or disagree about the morals of it, it'll remain marginal compared with the amounts transferred via centralized entities for reasons listed above. In particular, this is incompatible with your 4.:
> 4) stablecoin on/off-ramps to integration with the traditional financial system must be widely available, and 5) stablecoins in a variety of popular global currencies must be available and liquid.
As soon as you integrate with the traditional financial system, you have the same legal requirements. But as explained above, skirting regulations is actually the only one thing that you could do more easily with Ethereum. Once you've accepted to deal with the law, you're better off using centralized platforms all the way. If I have EUR and want to send you USD legally, why would I go through USDT or whatever blockchain token and pay higher fees?
In this space, there's still very little in terms of products with actual impact, to the point that it's hard to tell what will be left once (if ever) the noise from the blockchain-related scams disappears.
I was debating these points 5 years ago already. The fundamental problems I'm mentioning now were already there (the decentralization of a blockchain-based system breaking at its boundaries with the real-world, the oracle problem). The hype has evolved, but retains the same fundamental flaws.
One example of things that have changed is zero knowledge roll ups. When I first used ethereum, transacting with it was free and fairly quick. The QR code approach meant that it was easier, faster, cheaper and safer to transfer money with it than with my bank account. That changed dramatically for the worse once the systems started getting popular (and traditional banks upped their game too). With L2 systems like zksync, we're back to cheap and fast, and we don't have to give up the central security properties.
Another example of something that has changed for ethereum is Proof Of Stake. Some years ago, I worked for a large financial organisation, and we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain. Given the organisations eco aspirations, using a POW based system was never going to be acceptable. Now that ethereum is on Proof Of Stake, it's actually conceivable that these kinds of applications could be deployed by large financial institutions.
> we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain
If anything, large financial institutions have by now realized that they're not interested in public blockchains[0], one notable example as of late being the Australian Securities Exchange[1].
These technical improvements are a bit as if a salesman reduced the price of a product, on top of free delivery. That's nice, sure, but that doesn't mean you need the product any more than before. There are more fundamental reasons why smart contracts are not widely used, and they're not addressed by these technical improvements.
Gas prices (determine costs of transactions) haven’t been too high lately, though there can still be spikes when transaction volume surges. Gas prices will become less sensitive to such surges once the mainnet is sharded (plus L2s) because the chain will be able to handle a much higher max volume of transactions at any given time.
Only thing that drives Ethereum application ecosystem to allow people to gain and ofcourse to lose money. If Ethereum was not attached to financial interest the project would not grow. I believe the ecosystem and everything, it's all a scam. The platform, new emerging projects, all ads are serving exchanges to liquadate people and gain money and destroy their lives.
The traditional financial system also allow people to gain and lose money, even the U.S. central bank prints money out of air to support wars and loan money to banks.
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It comes from a techno-optimist perspective that attempts should still be made to see if it could be solved in the first place. The binary alternative is a nihilistic "don't ever try" mindset, wherein the Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, & Joseph Fourier shouldn't ever try to solve existing problems, and that they should just toil in misery like the rest of us.
There definitely exists gradients in between the two, but it's worrying that HN, a supposed place of hackers/experimentalists, is adopting a more "this'll never work" stance over time. The Dropbox negativity was the popular start of this downtrend, & I fear it's getting worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
It's like there is some sort of "I tried that and it didn't work, so no one should ever try it again and if you do I'll warn you and then ridicule you for wasting your time" attitude that permeates all of some people's contributions to the discussion. This attitude isn't just at the individual level but also at the team, company, societal levels.
This doesn't feel like a hacker mindset to me at all. It feels increasing defeatist.
While I can't point to HN glory days (I wasn't here), I imagine that HN is devolving from hacker news to defeatist expert news.
But maybe it's society as a whole? I don't know...
What I can say is that the real hackers (eg builders, not speculators) in the web3 communities seem to be more optimistic than the average interaction I see here.
What I am wondering, however, is if this scamming/pumping money will eventually make a legitimate industry. Many industries/technologies have started out of that (Military, Gambling, Sex, etc...)
Sure you can be "anonymous" when using your wallet etc, but as we all know it is usually trivial to de-anonymize large data sets. Likewise, being anonymous when using a wallet then removes a lot of the perceived value of using it for identity verification (e.g. sign-ins, proof of humanity etc).
Basically you can make transactions anonymous using much the same kind of protection as you have between public and private keys. There is a proof the transaction is valid but that is basically all you can see.
https://docs.zama.ai/concrete/getting-started/quick_start
This is a rust based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) example.
That is to say, you can encrypt two numbers, do a mathematical calculation on them without decrypting them, and then, only the person with the private key can decrypt the result to get the value.
If you add something like FHE to blockchains (it's coming) then you can get anonymous transactions on the blockchain directly.
By the way, Zero knowledge proofs are not what is needed to get anonymous transactions. When you use ZK, you are issuing the proof AND have knowledge of the inputs. The prover needs to know the inputs, but does not need to reveal them to the verifier (which happens on chain). This means the transaction can assert that the mathematical operation occurred without doubt, but when you need to get at the numbers, you are back to a transparent value on the chain.
Can you elaborate more on this? What is this a ZKP proof for? That the transaction is valid?
Also from all the ZKP examples I've seen in crypto[graphy] class, soundness relies on the ability to repeat the process again and again. How does this work for the blockchain case where it seems like there's only one round of communication between prover/verifier?
Dead Comment
My second reply would be a hybrid system. I've been tossing around this idea in my head for what I call a decentralized PBM. At first I struggled with the privacy idea. Then I had the realization that it was unnecessary to bring PHI on chain. I could accomplish all the stuff that would benefit from a chain without it.
You can realize a lot of value from blockchains even if you're not purely decentralized.
You can prove that you have the keys to sign. Without having to produce the key.
Or something of that effect. Cryptocurrencies are bunker. Zero Knowledge is a big deal.
Backup video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWTx1iQOCDM
Original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.00938
Clearly money and DeFi are already real and well-established things, whether they're "going great" is in the eye of the beholder. DAOs have been around for a while, and the main examples Vitalik lists are basically DeFi apps that call themselves DAOs. General-purpose DAOs that have real-world influence remain questionable things, mostly because they have too many human and legal dependencies. On-chain identity might be exciting. NFTs might eventually prove to have exciting real applications beyond apes. Blockchain voting remains an old idea that doesn't have much real benefit outside of DeFi project governance.
I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.
Ethereum no longer uses proof of work (computing power). Also, neither BTC nor ETH have a governance token.
The hard reality though is that ASICs are coming back to ETH (Vitalik has hinted at it in his own posts [0]) and at the end of the day, ETH needs compute.
[0] https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html
> I think Vitalik even said once that the only reason for small fish to buy governance tokens is in expectation of the price going up, and hoping they can be sold later to a larger fish, where the actual network is governed by a few. I don't see how "proof of humanity" is any different than this, since nothing stops collusion or other vectors for "vote buying". Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization. This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it. There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.
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> Decentralization is super hard to achieve in anything other than a toy universe.
> Power will always tend to centralization when money exists.
> It's obvious when the decentralization key is computing power, as money buys more computers and results in centralized control.
> Nothing stops one person from purchasing the voting power of another person.
> Centralization infects the very roots of decentralization.
> This is not an easy problem, and Bitcoin doesn't solve it, and no token out there currently solves it.
> There might not be any solution in the real world, where humans can communicate freely.
The parent comment is likely right, but it's engaging in a "it's not 100% perfect, so it's useless" fallacy: Just because we can't get 100% of the way there doesn't mean that the effort shouldn't be done in the first place.
The Bittorrent protocol is a good example of this, as the protocol's not perfect either, relying on centralized trackers for fast peering. Still, that didn't mean that the protocol couldn't improve, with Mainline DHT eventually being developed for the protocol. Even though it's still slower than a centralized tracker, it does its assigned job well & to great success.
Were such a viewpoint to be transplanted towards the Bittorrent protocol before DHT's creation, the parent would've likely viewed trackers to be "un-decentralizable" & therefore a waste of time. Attempts at decentralizing trackers would've been seen as a futile effort, as "they'll never be as efficient as centralized trackers".
In general, no working system is ever 100% perfect, so why is such an attitude still being projected upon all open-source projects?
It's likely that 100% decentralization will never be achieved, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't aim for at least 50%. The alternative is a nihilistic "we'll always need centralization" dystopia, & that fundamentally doesn't sit well with me all.
The product is an NFT which gives you legal ownership of an underlying physical object when you buy it. An individually numbered bar of gold in a vault. A scarce collectible. Real estate.
The real estate thing is interesting: transfer time goes down from around 4 months in the UK to a couple of days. The only delay is the KYCAMLCTFPEPOFACT checking: if that's done as a pre-clearing step the transfer of real estate will be instantaneous. It took several years to build this capability.
The blockchain is not done. http://mattereum.com/land
"The NFT is listed on the NFT marketplace OpenSea for offers over £1.9M"
That piece of land was last sold for £7000 on 20th October 2021.
https://search-property-information.service.gov.uk/search/su...
I know inflation is bad, but £7000 to £1.9M is an impressive increase in value, for a piece of scrubby beach that looks impossible to get planning permission for.
Say you have the NFT that claims ownership of a house. Now the local court allocates half of the house to your ex-husband whom you’ve just divorced. How is this (exemplary) case handled on the chain? How is any repossession through local legal system? Who gets to own the house should the private key be lost?
The answer to most of these questions is usually (I do not know your solution) some centralized entity that is introduced somewhere in the chain.
This may have come of as an attack, but be assured that I am genuinely curious whether a solution has been found that I am not aware of.
7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995 and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what has occurred.
8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales.
9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.
(quote ends)
Point being none of this is happening outside of the framework of law: transfer of ownership is the objective of the system. If you're legal owner of the house and a court takes half of it off you, the legal package around the NFT kicks in, breaks the tie between the NFT and the land (yes, there's an authoritative way of indicating this) and you then figure out what to do with the remaining property rights.
When dealing with land, the legal system is always primary.
What would happen if somebody used any kind of exploit to obtain the NFT? Could I as the new owner of the NFT just go to the local police, show the NFT in my wallet, and demand for the previous owner to be removed from it?
What happens if the person who owns the NFT dies without passing on the access to their wallet to anybody? Is the idea that this chunk of land is now eternally owned by a dead person? Would you expect the local law to comply with that?
You bring a case under those terms: "I am the legal owner of this land and I want the NFT which was owned by the deceased to be reissued to me". The legal binding on the original NFT is broken, and a new NFT is issued.
There's also provision under the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce digital dispute resolution rules https://lawtechuk.io/explore/ukjt-digital-disputes-rules to have an arbitrator use a judicial back door in the NFT contract to transfer ownership of the NFT if the contract has those affordances.
We feel that's very powerful.
Are you saying that in the UK it takes 4 months to transfer ownership of a gold bar or a collectible item? Do real estate transactions really take 4 months in the UK? Do you know if there are many other countries where ownership transfer is similarly cumbersome?
Its not a fast system, basically the seller and the buyers lawyers have to mutually verify the sale is legal etc etc (that the seller actually can sell the property, that its not encumbered by a mortgage or such, etc). Buyer needs proof of funds, etc.
Pre-clearing the property and potential buyers can cut this time to days or hours.
2. Why does this need a blockchain?
Also there's no other way of doing an e-commerce style purchase for something which is too expensive to pay for using a credit card. You can't buy land using Apple Pay.
1. See the above answer about somebody dying and leaving the NFT behind. Basically the NFT is stripped of its legal meaning, and then a clean NFT is reissued. You need a legal dispute raised before this can be ordered by a court, and that's the only situation under which it occurs.
If we can't figure out how to prevent this for a given asset, we don't touch that asset.
NFTs are worthless, unless you have official ownership of the thing. And if that's the case, then why the hell would I use an NFT ?
The blockchain is being used as a transactional technology here, not as a jurisdiction!
Disclosure: I have known @leashless since way before Ethereum.
Yes! The key here is the failover to English Common Law: if something breaks the failover is binding arbitration with a technically sophisticated arbitrator who will come in, figure out who owns what, make the awards, job done. Obviously that's minimal protection if (for example) somebody has their cryptocurrency stolen and it's just gone - but ownership of the physical property isn't subject to those kinds of misfortunes. It's 100% under law, as you would expect!
But on the other, there’s a lot of due diligence that is appropriate to carry out as a purchaser that doesn’t seem covered and it’s unclear that the NFT or blockchain adds anything to the picture - the value-add here is in having done the searches ahead of time.
It's actually a pretty good use case for the blockchain. It solves real problems here. Obviously it's not as sophisticated as systems that have been in use for 10 years, but it's a lot better than some of the archaic systems which still cleave to norms which have been in place for centuries.
I've got no idea what the fuck they are doing in the UK, but when I bought a house in the US my deed transfer was processed by the county in about six hours.
What takes the time is lawyers talking to each other about god knows what, for months on end, for no apparent reason. My last house sale in the UK took about 4 months to go through. I am glad I don’t live there any more.
So. The delay is still there, you still need KYC and other checks. The speed up is due to transfering paper records to a digital system, and has nothing to do with blockchain.
But sure. "NFTs and Blockchain" something something.
Good grief. In a backwards country of Moldova (where I'm from) property transfers (and other transfers like changing car ownership etc.) are instantaneous and don't need NFTs, blockchains or Ethereum. Go figure, must be happening by magic.
Source: experience buying houses and I worked on one of the systems for a year at the Land Registry (years ago, before Ethereum was a thing).
Fees are very low too.
It's a pretty impressive system overall: https://www.elra.eu/enriching-the-data-from-the-cadastre-and... and in jurisdictions with this kind of sophistication obviously there's less need for alternative solutions.
Disclaimer: I hold ETH.
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Transferring stablecoins is already a better experience than SWIFT though.
The Ethereum foundation has been focusing on technical problems since its inception, and your conclusion has always been the official motto: once we solve the "technical problems", users will come. But there will always be technical problems, and as each year passes with still no meaningful democratization of this tech, it's becoming doubtful that these limitations are the real issue.
Applications such as decentralized finance are only as interesting as the tokens they allow users to trade, but in turn these tokens are either shady (the world of FTT, USDT, etc.) or legal (requiring KYC, AML, etc.) so just like traditional finance. Once the former have fallen enough in disgrace, it's unclear what benefit there is to trade the latter (centralized tokens) on decentralized platforms.
It's easy to stack layers of abstractions, thinking the next one will be the one gathering users, and focusing on what we think is the last technical hurdle before mass adoption. After the 3rd or 4th iteration, one could start asking: what makes you think it'll make a difference this time?
Not much has changed since ICOs: same kind of ambitious claims with very little to show for it years after.
Take the use case of global stablecoin transfers. The ability to send cash point-to-point anywhere in the world is obviously valuable and novel.
But for global stablecoin transfers to be generally useful 1) everybody needs crypto wallets, 2) crypto wallets need to be increasingly safe and easy to use, 3) transaction fees need to be sufficiently low, 4) stablecoin on/off-ramps to integration with the traditional financial system must be widely available, and 5) stablecoins in a variety of popular global currencies must be available and liquid.
The industry has made progress in all five of the above areas in the past few years, and so good progress has been made on the greater goal of generally available point-to-point global cash transfers. Saying crypto "has no use cases" is lazy, uncurious, and intellectually bankrupt.
You're not sending "cash" though, you're most likely sending USDT or some other centralized stablecoin backed by a shady company ("stablecoin" is a very misleading term in this context given the counterparty risk). That's one point about trust being moved instead of removed, you need to trust the issuer to some extent. To this day I still haven't heard of a centralized stablecoin being fully audited, you merely get attestations, meaning that you can't treat them as "cash", you have a big risk just holding them.
Transferring / converting currencies from most countries to most other countries is easy and way cheaper via centralized means, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_(company) has been around for 11 years and was probably not first, and the fees are lower than what a blockchain transaction on BTC/ETH would cost. This is not even an apple to apple comparison, since in most cases you still need to convert your USDT back to USD to actually use them, incurring more fees in the process.
What ETH does allow you to do which you can't do with Wise and others is sending USDT without censorship. That's probably the best way to bypass US regulations if you want to send USD where the US government doesn't want you to. And some people suggest that this is how things should be, which is an interesting point. Whether you agree or disagree about the morals of it, it'll remain marginal compared with the amounts transferred via centralized entities for reasons listed above. In particular, this is incompatible with your 4.:
> 4) stablecoin on/off-ramps to integration with the traditional financial system must be widely available, and 5) stablecoins in a variety of popular global currencies must be available and liquid.
As soon as you integrate with the traditional financial system, you have the same legal requirements. But as explained above, skirting regulations is actually the only one thing that you could do more easily with Ethereum. Once you've accepted to deal with the law, you're better off using centralized platforms all the way. If I have EUR and want to send you USD legally, why would I go through USDT or whatever blockchain token and pay higher fees?
In this space, there's still very little in terms of products with actual impact, to the point that it's hard to tell what will be left once (if ever) the noise from the blockchain-related scams disappears.
I was debating these points 5 years ago already. The fundamental problems I'm mentioning now were already there (the decentralization of a blockchain-based system breaking at its boundaries with the real-world, the oracle problem). The hype has evolved, but retains the same fundamental flaws.
Another example of something that has changed for ethereum is Proof Of Stake. Some years ago, I worked for a large financial organisation, and we had a use case that would have saved a lot of internal work to move onto a public blockchain. Given the organisations eco aspirations, using a POW based system was never going to be acceptable. Now that ethereum is on Proof Of Stake, it's actually conceivable that these kinds of applications could be deployed by large financial institutions.
If anything, large financial institutions have by now realized that they're not interested in public blockchains[0], one notable example as of late being the Australian Securities Exchange[1].
These technical improvements are a bit as if a salesman reduced the price of a product, on top of free delivery. That's nice, sure, but that doesn't mean you need the product any more than before. There are more fundamental reasons why smart contracts are not widely used, and they're not addressed by these technical improvements.
[0]: as defined in https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... [1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-securities-exc...
The move to PoS is now complete and rollups are under active development.
For a lot of use cases scaling is a prerequisite and that's coming soon, likely 2-3 years of progressive improvements.
Transactions on rollups are as low as 2 cents and EIP 4488 is expected to bring that down about 100x.
You should really take a look at the roadmap: https://notes.ethereum.org/@domothy/roadmap
I think it's pretty easy to see that each transaction costing a few bucks (or tens of bucks at it's peak) is a huge issue if you want more adoption.
https://www.gasprice.io/