Narratives has had some really interesting people on to discuss Georgism recently. Vitalik is very much in favor of it, looks like he was convinced by Lars Doucet's series on the topic at ACX. He's probably right in arguing that the real issue is the fact that it's a pretty hard sell in the places that need it most, since that is where landownership and rent-seeking is most entrenched.
Can't say I agree about quadratic voting being superior to approval or range voting, though. Simplicity is a virtue in electoral systems, particularly in a relatively low-trust society like the US- and that's ignoring implementation.
As much as I’d be flattered if he was convinced by my piece, from what I can tell he’s been really into the idea for several years now; I think mostly what my series moved the needle for him on was countering the “land isn’t a big deal in the modern economy” objection.
It may be stated as a core design principle, but it is not actually acted on. Ethereum is waaaaaay more complex than it needs to be in almost every aspect, and is pretty much the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to blockchain design. Simple, it is not.
So the quadratic voting issue seems kinda curious to me. It seems like the best mechanism is through the use of tokens. But, I also assume that the tokens would have to be categorized to some degree right? i.e. you wouldn't use the same tokens for electing people that you use on issues themselves. But if you start breaking the voting topics down, don't the categories become somewhat arbitrary? i.e. do you have "Elections" "Constitutional" "Budgetary" categories each with their own voting tokens? If you have budgetary concerns, is it better to vote "for" your preference than "against" a different preference? Is every budgetary matter up for public approval?
I'm more interested in getting our revenue sources right (i.e. the public collection of land rent). Is the tyranny of the majority a major concern after that? It seems like the most viable projects should move forward by simply majority and the remainder can be returned as a citizen's dividend. Tyranny only exists when a decision creates a barrier to alternatives right? Perhaps someone can give an example where a spirited minority may want to use public funding for something that the majority does not want (or is less interested in) and that this spirited minority could not take their dividends to provide for themselves.
There's plenty of real world use cases. The fact that you insist that there are none says much more about you and amount effort you've spent on researching the topic that it does about crypto.
> 3) And the above is not an argument or a refutation.
It's not meant to be either. Vitalik is an intellectual. Tyler Cowen says he is one of the more interesting writers that he has come across. That's a big endorsement. But your comment is really not interesting at all and just a general rehash of an old debate.
There are hundreds of other threads on HN that would be appropriate for your comment. It just isn't this one.
> Vitalik is an intellectual. Tyler Cowen says he is one of the more interesting writers that he has come across. That's a big endorsement.
Appeal to authority isn't an argument either, I don't really care what Tyler Cowen says about Vitalik.
The whole point of a blockchain like Ethereum is that it's supposed to be immutable, with Vitalik's own actions in his role in the DAO hack, he has proven that it isn't at all.
So what is new about Ethereum except that we know that it really isn't an immutable blockchain. The Merge? Nothing will change even once complete which I would estimate in 2026 for merchants to use. Gas fees? Ethereum will always have this issue even after the merge.
So Ethereum is useless, just like the entire crypto space.
Don’t expect people to answer your question when it appears you have already decided what that answer is.
Do your own research. There are plenty of current and hypothetical use cases. A lot of the value derives from shifting your mental models away from traditional views of currency and monetary authority that are, frankly, outdated.
> Do your own research. There are plenty of current and hypothetical use cases.
Claim: "There are plenty of current and hypothetical use cases."
Response: "Please list these real world usecases of crypto that the average person can use right now."
Claimant: "Do your own research."
This is the problem that I see with most people who are in the crypto space, "Do your own research" is not a usecase and is in fact a veil to suggest that there is no usecase to begin with.
It's not really Vitalik's fault how a decentralized platform is used, for better or for worse. Can only hope people lose interest in buying into crypto scams altogether, or that regulators do their job.
And yes, I know Ethereum is not that decentralized.
If an API allows for awful behavior, shouldn't you blame the designer of that API? Or at least, blame their unwillingness to change that API? What if the awful behavior is baked into the API at its heart?
I mean, I think crypto is pretty stupid and scammy myself (and if you know Lars he is suspicious of most blockchain stuff as well) but Vitalik seems like one of the more legitimate people working in that field. You may disagree with his assessment of how useful cryptocurrencies will be but he's not running scams.
After the DAO hack I think Ethereum pretty much failed at being an immutable blockchain, which proves it doesn't work at all, and I think Vitalik is kidding himself with this.
'The Merge' is just smoke and mirrors really and doesn't solve anything like the gas fees which is an overdue problem in Ethereum.
Reading though your comment history is hilarious. It’s like you’re on a mission from Christ to destroy the evil crypto industry by authoring angry comments on HN. Did you ever think this was what you would spend your days doing?
It's also hilarious the crypto market is doing all of these things by itself, just as I said. Just now 3AC (3 Arrows Capital) defaulted, Bitcoin is at $20K and sliding lower, Tether is sweating bullets, so pretty much everything I'm saying is already unfolding.
Almost 15 years and I cannot see any usecase for crypto. But yes, it is an evil industry.
> pretty much everything I'm saying is already unfolding.
By definition, cynics are validated in a bear market. That hardly substantiates the claim that the space "needs to be destroyed", nor does it consider the reality that it's here to stay in one form or another.
Instead of screaming murder from the sidelines, maybe it'd more instructive to provide a list of ways that the space could be improved.
it's still hilarious to me that Bitcoin at 20K is considered a "crash", I remember a few years ago when Bitcoin at 20K was a sign of a massive bubble. People who are rattled by this are giving away the fact they are new to crypto
what is the cynic mindset here? It will crash to $8K and stay put forever? Or keep going down to zero?
It’s hard to imagine the value will go to zero. Harder to imagine that these networks will not continue to improve and find new use cases each year or decade. Ten years ago there was no stablecoins. Five years ago it was hard to imagine how ZKP could reshape blockchain privacy and scalability. Two years ago there was no concept of optimistic and zk rollups that many chains are now adopting.
Looks like M-Pesa is only available in 7 countries.
> The actual cost is a fixed amount for a given range of transaction sizes; for example Safaricom charges up to 66 KShs (0.65 USD) for a transaction to an unregistered user for transactions between 101 and 500 KShs (0.99–4.9 USD). For registered users the charge is 27 KShs (0.26 USD) or 5.4% to 27% for the same amount.
0.65 for $1-5 transaction means a fee between 13-65%
I don't know about the others but my guess is they are similar. Crypto on layer 2 can be a lot cheaper, ubiquitous and not restricted to geography.
Crypto has religious zealots on both sides of the table for some reason. Sometime in the future we'll probably have books on the psychology aspect of it all, I look forward to reading about it.
This seems to be common among those who have lost money. Rather than picking up and moving on, they make it their life’s mission to just attack whatever they feel “wronged” them.
Nothing particulary bad for some less smart people loosing money on stuff they don't understand. Let it be a lesson. Maybe next time they won't believe every thing they see on youtube or TV
Indices, mostly. And they understand it well enough to understand that they have no hope of outperforming by thinking for themselves, which is why they invest in indices rather than picking individual things to invest in.
Firstly, there is zero chance of understanding an index. Corporations are legal entities formed by documents, each unique, holding assets like intellectual property, and executed by people. It is clearly infeasible you understand all of that for an index. The best you can do is extrapolate from the history of “number go up”.
Secondly, you invoke the efficient market hypothesis for stocks via portfolio theory, which should then apply just as well to alternatives. Higher risk/volatility implies higher expected returns. This is assuming perfect information transparency.
This is where your argument fails. Crypto (on-chain) is a perfectly-transparent market. Stocks are almost perfectly opaque. So crypto is an almost tautologically efficient regardless of whether it shoots the moon or drops to zero. Until recently, crypto was also uncorrelated with stocks, which made them a perfect return-boosting companion to a portfolio. Not anymore of course.
I rather like the EVM technology. I wouldn't mind some more centralized ones that can launch of the same things, because I just like deploying on and analyzing EVMs. Its pretty great as a developer tool for launching projects, and there are sooo many EVMs now that Vitalik isn't even relevant outside of the Ethereum EVM.
Can you please stop taking HN threads into generic flamewars on this extremely divisive and repetitive topic? Regardless of which views are right/wrong, it seriously degrades the threads, and you've unfortunately been doing it quite a bit lately. (You're far from the only one, of course.)
Edit: we asked you exactly the same thing quite a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628900. It hasn't gotten better. Worse yet, you've been using HN primarily to post on this flamewar topic. That's actually the line at which we ban accounts. I don't want to ban you, but we need you to use HN as intended: that means curious conversation on unpredictable topics, not repetitive flamewar. If you'd please fix this, we'd appreciate it.
How does one get in touch with @VitalikButerin? How does one invite him to a podcast?
I have interviewed Noam Chomsky and other political commentators, Sara Hanks from the SEC and other former regulators, Thomas Greco and other community currency economists (and by the way, we explicitly discussed Henry George and Progress and Poverty etc.)
But when I spoke to Vitalik’s dad he explicitly said Vitalik asked him not to share any links with him and make no introductions. Vitalik prefers to discover stuff on his own. So how does he get on these podcasts?
Everything Vitalik talks about, we have BUILT using his platform EVM (https://intercoin.org/applications) and are now moving past it and blockchains, eg to build the Intercloud. The other week I spoke with Dyne about anonymous group signatures because we need them for voting, UBI and other applications where each person has to have exactly one account.
I’ve spoken directly to the former and current CTOs of Ripple, the entire teams behind MaidSAFE, Cardano, and much more. Vitalik is the only one I was never able to get in touch with. He and his dad always talks about how the crypto space should build the kinds of things WE HAVE BUILT over the last 4 years.
I know on HN some people just downvote anything related to crypto. But look at the link above — everything is open sourced and documented and being audited and we have a show explaining how it works. What is wrong with that? What is bad? There needs to be more POSITIVITY and COLLABORATION helping each other, rather than all this competition and shitting on each other.
The end game should be open source software that helps communities of people self organize and get things done. We won’t achieve it if we keep being so divided and bickering, we’ll just live in an increasingly centrally planned world, with CBDCs and Big Tech mediating and controlling ALL OUR INTERACTIONS AND TRANSACTIONS.
I am surprised that “Hacker News” is often so much in favor of the Web2 status quo of VC-funded Wall st-funded Big Tech, with their centralized server farms. Shouldn’t we be supporting hacking on new things? To the perennial silent downvoters: use your words, say something.
Because as we get chat bot AI and Apple Glass and then Neuralink, everything is going to be more immersive and you’ll spend more time in these metaverses, the question of corporate control of the metaverses vs open source software will become ever more important. Do we want to be the Borg or do we want to be free?
Vitalik has been selling the same dream for a decade now, and even though crypto is booming it still feels like we're no closer to realizing the goals of Ethereum or the virtues of a digital currency. Having listened to this guy rant about the Next Big Thing since high school, I'm pretty jaded by his opinion.
The primary market, amongst crypto and other markets, are actually doing pretty well.
Newly launched cryptos, newly launched NFTs*, teams that merely plan to do those things are getting funded, even bonds in the sovereign and corporate markets are being issued okay and bought up completely.
Its just secondary market that's puking and plastered all over the charts everywhere. Doesn't tell you as much you think it does.
Primary markets will eat pig slop if you feed it to them, Y Combinator is living proof of that. If the demand for your product tanks in the secondary market, there's a very good chance that the product you're selling isn't very attractive to the layman.
When I say crypto is doing "well", I mean so relatively. The markets are in agony right now, and many of the people who I know who have their life savings in crypto are getting wiped out. The primary market says nothing about how successful cryptocurrency is, just how lucrative it is. Getting someone to buy a worthless thing has a 100% markup, so it's unsurprising the market is still luring investors in with the promise of Yet Another Useless Token.
My larger point is that cryptocurrency had it's chance, and people like Vitalik are the coffin bearers. This brand of economic accelerationism consistently ends in disaster, and crypto is just the same story told through a different lens. It's the Juicero of the 2020s, a concept so useless that it can only move units by fooling customers with insane marketing. Look around at NFT and cryptocurrency ads, you'll get the picture.
> My larger point is that cryptocurrency had it's chance, and people like Vitalik are the coffin bearers. This brand of economic accelerationism consistently ends in disaster, and crypto is just the same story told through a different lens. It's the Juicero of the 2020s, a concept so useless that it can only move units by fooling customers with insane marketing. Look around at NFT and cryptocurrency ads, you'll get the picture.
100% this. They've had their time to produce something useful. It's time to pack it in and admit that the emperor has no clothes.
Secondary markets are where the rubber meets the road. That $3M NFT selling for $10 is reality telling you that maybe you needed more utility and serve people rather than shuffle tokens around in zero-sum speculative trading echo chambers.
I have met so many great people in the space of what I work on (crypto, social networks, open source, sociopolitical and economic applications). Everyone from Andrew Yang to Noam Chomsky and Leslie Lamport.
You have never heard of me and that’s fine, I like that. What I can tell you is, the people who collaborate and appear and are willing to work together in the space, they will get things done and there are a ton of great projects coming out. Like Dyne with their Relay group signing and zeneoom that I spoke with last week.
I don’t need Vitalik. And yes, Ethereum is very limited. It’s just frustrating to hear the guy for years call for the things that we are building to be actually built — while he has a billion dollars in ETH and the ideas but doesn’t fund it himself. Same as EOS that raised 4 bil. We have funded all the stuff for half a mil that we raised — some of the commenters on this thread are surprised we are able to do all that. Yes we are. The code is there and free to use.
ReadyPlayerMe, Dyne, Hypercore and others were funded by governments and foundations and did a tremendous job. We have been also. The code is released and people are building on it. We are about to release some major things this summer. I somewhat enjoy collecting the knee-jerk downvotes from HN people who barely look at it. Because it won’t age well, in a few years, and it’s a bit entertaining to be underestimated.
I admit that my desire to speak to Vitalik is just out of a desire to network to smart people who have arrived at similar conclusions and share ideas. Honestly, I don’t need it at all. We can execute without it. It’s just about indulging myself.
In 2017 there were a lot of projects that tried to latch onto Buterin's star in some way to raise money for their ICO or pump the price of their token.
How many podcasts also have their own cryptocurrency? It speaks to promotion vs. dialogue and discussion.
> There needs to be more POSITIVITY and COLLABORATION helping each other, rather than all this competition and shitting on each other.
He's a public figure in a space full of attention seeking people. So, I can appreciate him just filtering out all the noise. Chances are he actually saw your message(s) and simply did not dignify it with a response. That's how I treat recruiter spam too.
The way through would be convincing a mutual acquaintance that you are actually worth his time. Probably he gets bombarded with requests to be on this or that podcasts, interviews, etc. So, your chance of success is pretty low. Basically, you are asking him to take time out of his schedule for you without any good reason beyond that that would please you.
He made some time for Lex Fridman at least. But that's someone that he might know and respect and someone with a huge audience.
Your sales pitch is horrible btw. That kind of messaging would turn me off as well. A little more humility might help you.
You describe it as the native settlement and computing layer of a utopian federation. Sounds good, but even your intro video has your founder selling your ERC20 specifically as an investment, running on Eth as the settlement and compute layer, and with near-infinite minting power. I’ll give you marginal credit for sticking to it after the ICO bust.
I’m as close to your core audience for those ideas as you’ll get, but your idealistic appeal sets you up for a vigorous test of your integrity. You claim functionality and adoption that doesn’t exist, you make a specific appeal to speculation in your actual fundraising operations, your pitch is based on implied personal endorsements that are clearly unintended, and you spam this board asking for help co-opting VB’s endorsement after stalking his family didn’t work. Most importantly to this forum, you have contributed nothing of value to the conversation. Red flags abound.
I’m only replying because it seems you may not realize the difference between what you are doing and what people would expect from a legitimate project.
Not to be harsh, but as you are asking for feedback I will be critical for you in the hope it is helpful and honest.
You come off a too strong. its off putting. This is general advice for selling a project, not just for crypto.
Your link clicks through to a post describing web4.0 - i get that you want to be seen as different but again its off putting and egotistical. I know what web3.0 is, now i need to know about something else? It sounds like "we've done it, we are better than the rest, we deserve to talk to people and they should care" and before we even know who you are or what youve done im already tired and feel like im being talked down to. Then i go to your home page and its talking about web5? I feel like im being trolled.
I guess thats probably out of frustration from your perspective of feeling like you have a product but want more momentum, but think of it as UI/UX problem and rethink how you are promoting your work. The language makes me feel sceptical and it isn't attracting me to come work with you and talk to you.
This is a problem many organisations (and individuals) have, and this is why companies hire people for PR and outreach and comms and excellent designers.
Make us care, not by telling us we should care, but by demonstrating how good your solution is. Not by listing all your repositories (and i simply dont believe one organisation is working on NFTs/Community-currencies/Voting/their own chain?... its too much. Tell me the one thing you do better than everyone else, focus your energy).
Dont add a link to a forum post with two responses. Link me to a well designed product that is working (think about the uniswap website which was a massive step up for crypto design and lots of crypto places should learn from it. simple and effective).
On a team of 12 on your homepage you have 5 managers and 1 designer? for all these projects, really?
edit: and then think of Vitalik getting a thousand requests a day, hes probably thinking "why do they need to talk to me so bad". and is that really where your energy and focus needs to go?
Thank you, you’re right. I went back and changed Web 4.0 to Web 5.0 — I forgot we had to update it on that page ever since Jack Dorsey came out with his Web2 + Web3 formula.
Well, not so fast. Blockchain is a technology. You are clearly against some of the _applications_ built on top of the blockchain — and I would agree with you that many of them (albeit hopefully not all of them) are scams. You shouldn't generalize, though.
The blockchain still has merits as a concept, and the idea of distributed ledgers does make sense in some applications — just not as many as we're trying to round peg-square-hole into it.
I think the central idea of a distributed non-permissioned database with a zero trust consensus mechanism, particularly one where transaction cannot be blocked or censored is a pretty useful thing. At it's heart, that's what cryptocurrency is all about.
It also happens to be rife with scams, mania, wildly non-useful projects, and all the rest. Just because it has terrible parts doesn't mean the underlying idea isn't useful.
There are so many reasons why even what you're saying is actually just bad!
Someone mints a token which contains revenge porn, or PII, or whatever - just basically "bad stuff" about you, without your permission. Unfortunately, now it's permanently on the blockchain. There is no way to take it down, even if the culprit goes to jail.
You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens. They basically become landmines waiting to be tripped, and they're all made to look like something legitimate. How did anyone think that was good?
When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful. Sure, you can fix some of these things, but then it just starts to look more and more like the kinds of systems we've been designing for decades. At the end of the day, it was always vapor, designed by people who weren't as smart as they believed.
>Someone mints a token which contains revenge porn, or PII, or whatever - just basically "bad stuff" about you, without your permission. Unfortunately, now it's permanently on the blockchain. There is no way to take it down, even if the culprit goes to jail.
I could also go write bad things about you and pay someone to launch it into orbit where it will be similarly stable. I could find the sequence in PI that encodes your personal social security number and shout it in a crowded room and you can't ever delete that information either, no matter how small of a jail cell you put me in. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. This also prevents governments from deciding who you are and are not allowed to transact with, whether your money is worth less today than it was yesterday, and whether you can spend your money (power) how you want to.
>You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens.
You're going to need to explain what you think you're saying here, because this is not a property of any well constructed crypto system in existence.
>When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful.
Yes, crypto is more difficult to use than the fiat economy alternatives, at least right now. Technology is rarely very useful when it's first developed and especially so in cases where a strong network effect is required for it to be useful in the first place.
All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come.
> All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come.
I thought we were having a decent conversation here so I'm disappointed you went with the low effort response. I guess I will only point out that I don't think 'no dystopias' is an option you get. I think you have to pick the one you hate least, if past experience predicts future results.
> I think the central idea ... is a pretty useful thing.
What's the best use case that you care to name?
> It also happens to be rife with scams, mania, wildly non-useful projects, and all the rest. Just because it has terrible parts
This is the argument that "sure, 98% of it is crap, but there's good too".
Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification.
Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers are worth it alone, in my eyes. Coming up second is the ability for money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust the execution of that program. Those are both primitives upon which pretty cool stuff can be built.
>Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification.
I think it's OK to believe in the core value of an area that also has a lot of scams. When they first invented electricity there were an enormous number of conmen who sold miraculous electro-cures for ailments, etc. It's just because people are interested in new technology, so operating scams in new technology is a good way to find people you can scam. In 50 years all the scams will revolve around whatever newfangled technology exists then, it's a pretty basic human pattern. Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not.
Follow through writh that, what is the actual use case for "Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers" is it legal, and are volatile ctypto tokens good at it?
IMHO: No and no.
> money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust
is is a) money and b) how has that trust (AKA bug bounty) worked out?
> Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not.
And the fact that it is full of scams does not make it "the society-altering technology of the time"
> “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
>Follow through writh that, what is the actual use case for "Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers" is it legal, and are volatile ctypto tokens good at it?
Is it legal? Maybe not. I'm not necessarily concerned with whether transfers are legal or not. From my point of view the most important property is that transfers of value work. Issues of whether governments approve of those transfers is less important to me.
Are crypto transfers a good solution? Absolutely yes, IMHO. The fact that so much illegal transfer happens over, for example, Monero is the proof in the pudding that it is a good solution.
> Is it legal? Maybe not. I'm not necessarily concerned with whether transfers are legal or not. From my point of view the most important property is that transfers of value work.
Work that through, "it's illegal banking infrastructure, but it works" and you assume that it's a) legit, not a scam, and b) it's going to continue working long-term despite being illegal. How is the appropriate regular going to fit in, or not? IDK why you have not joined the dots.
> Are crypto transfers a good solution? Absolutely yes, IMHO.
Comparted to what? Wise.com? SEPA (EU) ? NIBSS (Nigeria) M-pesa?
If you're saying "but we don't have those, so.." then you're implying that better non-crypto solutions do exist in the world. Crypto is yet another attempt to "use technology to solve a social problem" that is best addressed another way.
Maybe someone more familiar with Vitalik Buterin can fill me in here...
Vitalik mentions that he's interested in both approval voting and quadratic voting. He seems to say that quadratic voting is exciting because it's "more optimal" in a certain sense, compared with score voting. But Will Jarvis highlights the tension between optimal vs easy-to-understand:
Jarvis: "And is there [...] a trade off [...] between a system that’s more optimal, but it’s harder to explain and kind of illegible to people to one that’s easy to explain, and somewhat easier to implement."
Is the implication that Buterin likes quadratic voting more in principle, but he supports approval voting because it's easier to explain and implement? I wish they'd spent more time on this section!
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadCan't say I agree about quadratic voting being superior to approval or range voting, though. Simplicity is a virtue in electoral systems, particularly in a relatively low-trust society like the US- and that's ignoring implementation.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/147740277221558682...
I'm more interested in getting our revenue sources right (i.e. the public collection of land rent). Is the tyranny of the majority a major concern after that? It seems like the most viable projects should move forward by simply majority and the remainder can be returned as a citizen's dividend. Tyranny only exists when a decision creates a barrier to alternatives right? Perhaps someone can give an example where a spirited minority may want to use public funding for something that the majority does not want (or is less interested in) and that this spirited minority could not take their dividends to provide for themselves.
1) No one is making anyone do anything.
2) This comment is more appropriate for /r/buttcoin than HN
Such as none? Since you have listed zero real world examples or usecases as usual.
It's not meant to be either. Vitalik is an intellectual. Tyler Cowen says he is one of the more interesting writers that he has come across. That's a big endorsement. But your comment is really not interesting at all and just a general rehash of an old debate.
There are hundreds of other threads on HN that would be appropriate for your comment. It just isn't this one.
Appeal to authority isn't an argument either, I don't really care what Tyler Cowen says about Vitalik.
The whole point of a blockchain like Ethereum is that it's supposed to be immutable, with Vitalik's own actions in his role in the DAO hack, he has proven that it isn't at all.
So what is new about Ethereum except that we know that it really isn't an immutable blockchain. The Merge? Nothing will change even once complete which I would estimate in 2026 for merchants to use. Gas fees? Ethereum will always have this issue even after the merge.
So Ethereum is useless, just like the entire crypto space.
Do your own research. There are plenty of current and hypothetical use cases. A lot of the value derives from shifting your mental models away from traditional views of currency and monetary authority that are, frankly, outdated.
Claim: "There are plenty of current and hypothetical use cases."
Response: "Please list these real world usecases of crypto that the average person can use right now."
Claimant: "Do your own research."
This is the problem that I see with most people who are in the crypto space, "Do your own research" is not a usecase and is in fact a veil to suggest that there is no usecase to begin with.
And yes, I know Ethereum is not that decentralized.
Virtually all nuclear physicists advocated for something that amounts to the ICAN. Here's Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell's manifesto for the abolishment of nuclear weapons: https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/russell-einstei...
Vitalik doesn't give a shit about the harm he's done.
'The Merge' is just smoke and mirrors really and doesn't solve anything like the gas fees which is an overdue problem in Ethereum.
Almost 15 years and I cannot see any usecase for crypto. But yes, it is an evil industry.
Tether is fine at this point. It makes people so frustrated that it hasn't gone to $0 yet. So frustrated.
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
We both know that web3 is a space filled by VCs anyway and are always dumped on retail traders and the average person.
So yes it is a scam.
Have you considered that retail wants to take risks?
If you see a startup that has taken VC money (especially if it is crypto) it's pretty much a complete scam that you should stay away from.
By definition, cynics are validated in a bear market. That hardly substantiates the claim that the space "needs to be destroyed", nor does it consider the reality that it's here to stay in one form or another.
Instead of screaming murder from the sidelines, maybe it'd more instructive to provide a list of ways that the space could be improved.
It can't be improved, since crypto has failed at absolutely everything it has tried to improve already.
Too volatile to be used as payments.
Not even decentralised (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.)
Not a store of value or digital gold.
Not a hedge against inflation
Most 'DeFi' applications don't have any actual usecase.
Stablecoins aren't even stable and have in fact crashed.
And there is no real usecase for blockchain, crypto, web3 or whatever that improves greatly of what the current system has already.
it's still hilarious to me that Bitcoin at 20K is considered a "crash", I remember a few years ago when Bitcoin at 20K was a sign of a massive bubble. People who are rattled by this are giving away the fact they are new to crypto
I'm expecting it to go even lower, below $10K to $8K.
It’s hard to imagine the value will go to zero. Harder to imagine that these networks will not continue to improve and find new use cases each year or decade. Ten years ago there was no stablecoins. Five years ago it was hard to imagine how ZKP could reshape blockchain privacy and scalability. Two years ago there was no concept of optimistic and zk rollups that many chains are now adopting.
What happens in the next 5 years? 10? 50?
What about the use-case of sending money to pretty much anyone with a cell phone and no bank account?
> The actual cost is a fixed amount for a given range of transaction sizes; for example Safaricom charges up to 66 KShs (0.65 USD) for a transaction to an unregistered user for transactions between 101 and 500 KShs (0.99–4.9 USD). For registered users the charge is 27 KShs (0.26 USD) or 5.4% to 27% for the same amount.
0.65 for $1-5 transaction means a fee between 13-65%
I don't know about the others but my guess is they are similar. Crypto on layer 2 can be a lot cheaper, ubiquitous and not restricted to geography.
https://mpesaguide.com/which-countries-use-mpesa-mobile-mone...
Secondly, you invoke the efficient market hypothesis for stocks via portfolio theory, which should then apply just as well to alternatives. Higher risk/volatility implies higher expected returns. This is assuming perfect information transparency.
This is where your argument fails. Crypto (on-chain) is a perfectly-transparent market. Stocks are almost perfectly opaque. So crypto is an almost tautologically efficient regardless of whether it shoots the moon or drops to zero. Until recently, crypto was also uncorrelated with stocks, which made them a perfect return-boosting companion to a portfolio. Not anymore of course.
I rather like the EVM technology. I wouldn't mind some more centralized ones that can launch of the same things, because I just like deploying on and analyzing EVMs. Its pretty great as a developer tool for launching projects, and there are sooo many EVMs now that Vitalik isn't even relevant outside of the Ethereum EVM.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: we asked you exactly the same thing quite a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628900. It hasn't gotten better. Worse yet, you've been using HN primarily to post on this flamewar topic. That's actually the line at which we ban accounts. I don't want to ban you, but we need you to use HN as intended: that means curious conversation on unpredictable topics, not repetitive flamewar. If you'd please fix this, we'd appreciate it.
I have interviewed Noam Chomsky and other political commentators, Sara Hanks from the SEC and other former regulators, Thomas Greco and other community currency economists (and by the way, we explicitly discussed Henry George and Progress and Poverty etc.)
But when I spoke to Vitalik’s dad he explicitly said Vitalik asked him not to share any links with him and make no introductions. Vitalik prefers to discover stuff on his own. So how does he get on these podcasts?
Everything Vitalik talks about, we have BUILT using his platform EVM (https://intercoin.org/applications) and are now moving past it and blockchains, eg to build the Intercloud. The other week I spoke with Dyne about anonymous group signatures because we need them for voting, UBI and other applications where each person has to have exactly one account.
I’ve spoken directly to the former and current CTOs of Ripple, the entire teams behind MaidSAFE, Cardano, and much more. Vitalik is the only one I was never able to get in touch with. He and his dad always talks about how the crypto space should build the kinds of things WE HAVE BUILT over the last 4 years.
I know on HN some people just downvote anything related to crypto. But look at the link above — everything is open sourced and documented and being audited and we have a show explaining how it works. What is wrong with that? What is bad? There needs to be more POSITIVITY and COLLABORATION helping each other, rather than all this competition and shitting on each other.
The end game should be open source software that helps communities of people self organize and get things done. We won’t achieve it if we keep being so divided and bickering, we’ll just live in an increasingly centrally planned world, with CBDCs and Big Tech mediating and controlling ALL OUR INTERACTIONS AND TRANSACTIONS.
I am surprised that “Hacker News” is often so much in favor of the Web2 status quo of VC-funded Wall st-funded Big Tech, with their centralized server farms. Shouldn’t we be supporting hacking on new things? To the perennial silent downvoters: use your words, say something.
Because as we get chat bot AI and Apple Glass and then Neuralink, everything is going to be more immersive and you’ll spend more time in these metaverses, the question of corporate control of the metaverses vs open source software will become ever more important. Do we want to be the Borg or do we want to be free?
Newly launched cryptos, newly launched NFTs*, teams that merely plan to do those things are getting funded, even bonds in the sovereign and corporate markets are being issued okay and bought up completely.
Its just secondary market that's puking and plastered all over the charts everywhere. Doesn't tell you as much you think it does.
When I say crypto is doing "well", I mean so relatively. The markets are in agony right now, and many of the people who I know who have their life savings in crypto are getting wiped out. The primary market says nothing about how successful cryptocurrency is, just how lucrative it is. Getting someone to buy a worthless thing has a 100% markup, so it's unsurprising the market is still luring investors in with the promise of Yet Another Useless Token.
My larger point is that cryptocurrency had it's chance, and people like Vitalik are the coffin bearers. This brand of economic accelerationism consistently ends in disaster, and crypto is just the same story told through a different lens. It's the Juicero of the 2020s, a concept so useless that it can only move units by fooling customers with insane marketing. Look around at NFT and cryptocurrency ads, you'll get the picture.
100% this. They've had their time to produce something useful. It's time to pack it in and admit that the emperor has no clothes.
So, booming one might say? Like in a boom town? Where nobody actually cares what product is being exported just that they can get paid a lot for it?
Ethereum alone (let alone cryptocurrency in general) predates and postdates Juicero's existence by a wide margin.
I have met so many great people in the space of what I work on (crypto, social networks, open source, sociopolitical and economic applications). Everyone from Andrew Yang to Noam Chomsky and Leslie Lamport.
You have never heard of me and that’s fine, I like that. What I can tell you is, the people who collaborate and appear and are willing to work together in the space, they will get things done and there are a ton of great projects coming out. Like Dyne with their Relay group signing and zeneoom that I spoke with last week.
I don’t need Vitalik. And yes, Ethereum is very limited. It’s just frustrating to hear the guy for years call for the things that we are building to be actually built — while he has a billion dollars in ETH and the ideas but doesn’t fund it himself. Same as EOS that raised 4 bil. We have funded all the stuff for half a mil that we raised — some of the commenters on this thread are surprised we are able to do all that. Yes we are. The code is there and free to use.
ReadyPlayerMe, Dyne, Hypercore and others were funded by governments and foundations and did a tremendous job. We have been also. The code is released and people are building on it. We are about to release some major things this summer. I somewhat enjoy collecting the knee-jerk downvotes from HN people who barely look at it. Because it won’t age well, in a few years, and it’s a bit entertaining to be underestimated.
I admit that my desire to speak to Vitalik is just out of a desire to network to smart people who have arrived at similar conclusions and share ideas. Honestly, I don’t need it at all. We can execute without it. It’s just about indulging myself.
How many podcasts also have their own cryptocurrency? It speaks to promotion vs. dialogue and discussion.
> There needs to be more POSITIVITY and COLLABORATION helping each other, rather than all this competition and shitting on each other.
Not when there are fundamental disagreements.
The way through would be convincing a mutual acquaintance that you are actually worth his time. Probably he gets bombarded with requests to be on this or that podcasts, interviews, etc. So, your chance of success is pretty low. Basically, you are asking him to take time out of his schedule for you without any good reason beyond that that would please you.
He made some time for Lex Fridman at least. But that's someone that he might know and respect and someone with a huge audience.
Your sales pitch is horrible btw. That kind of messaging would turn me off as well. A little more humility might help you.
I’m as close to your core audience for those ideas as you’ll get, but your idealistic appeal sets you up for a vigorous test of your integrity. You claim functionality and adoption that doesn’t exist, you make a specific appeal to speculation in your actual fundraising operations, your pitch is based on implied personal endorsements that are clearly unintended, and you spam this board asking for help co-opting VB’s endorsement after stalking his family didn’t work. Most importantly to this forum, you have contributed nothing of value to the conversation. Red flags abound.
I’m only replying because it seems you may not realize the difference between what you are doing and what people would expect from a legitimate project.
You come off a too strong. its off putting. This is general advice for selling a project, not just for crypto.
Your link clicks through to a post describing web4.0 - i get that you want to be seen as different but again its off putting and egotistical. I know what web3.0 is, now i need to know about something else? It sounds like "we've done it, we are better than the rest, we deserve to talk to people and they should care" and before we even know who you are or what youve done im already tired and feel like im being talked down to. Then i go to your home page and its talking about web5? I feel like im being trolled.
I guess thats probably out of frustration from your perspective of feeling like you have a product but want more momentum, but think of it as UI/UX problem and rethink how you are promoting your work. The language makes me feel sceptical and it isn't attracting me to come work with you and talk to you.
This is a problem many organisations (and individuals) have, and this is why companies hire people for PR and outreach and comms and excellent designers.
Make us care, not by telling us we should care, but by demonstrating how good your solution is. Not by listing all your repositories (and i simply dont believe one organisation is working on NFTs/Community-currencies/Voting/their own chain?... its too much. Tell me the one thing you do better than everyone else, focus your energy).
Dont add a link to a forum post with two responses. Link me to a well designed product that is working (think about the uniswap website which was a massive step up for crypto design and lots of crypto places should learn from it. simple and effective). On a team of 12 on your homepage you have 5 managers and 1 designer? for all these projects, really?
edit: and then think of Vitalik getting a thousand requests a day, hes probably thinking "why do they need to talk to me so bad". and is that really where your energy and focus needs to go?
Much better!
Maybe he listens to the podcasts, or is familiar with the hosts, and thinks they are good? That seems like the most parsimonious explanation.
The blockchain still has merits as a concept, and the idea of distributed ledgers does make sense in some applications — just not as many as we're trying to round peg-square-hole into it.
Please list these merits.
It also happens to be rife with scams, mania, wildly non-useful projects, and all the rest. Just because it has terrible parts doesn't mean the underlying idea isn't useful.
Someone mints a token which contains revenge porn, or PII, or whatever - just basically "bad stuff" about you, without your permission. Unfortunately, now it's permanently on the blockchain. There is no way to take it down, even if the culprit goes to jail.
You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens. They basically become landmines waiting to be tripped, and they're all made to look like something legitimate. How did anyone think that was good?
When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful. Sure, you can fix some of these things, but then it just starts to look more and more like the kinds of systems we've been designing for decades. At the end of the day, it was always vapor, designed by people who weren't as smart as they believed.
I could also go write bad things about you and pay someone to launch it into orbit where it will be similarly stable. I could find the sequence in PI that encodes your personal social security number and shout it in a crowded room and you can't ever delete that information either, no matter how small of a jail cell you put me in. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. This also prevents governments from deciding who you are and are not allowed to transact with, whether your money is worth less today than it was yesterday, and whether you can spend your money (power) how you want to.
>You can send people tokens that contain smart contracts which are written to wipe our wallet if you accidentally interact with it. There is no way to refuse one of these tokens.
You're going to need to explain what you think you're saying here, because this is not a property of any well constructed crypto system in existence.
>When you learn about how amateur all of the crypto ecosystem actually is, like in terms of its fundamental design, you realize that it's simply not that useful.
Yes, crypto is more difficult to use than the fiat economy alternatives, at least right now. Technology is rarely very useful when it's first developed and especially so in cases where a strong network effect is required for it to be useful in the first place.
All I can say is that I much prefer a future in which the global financial system is owned by all of us as opposed to a global financial system owned by corporate financial fiefdoms where you no longer have Dollars and Euros and Yen but instead corporate scrip owned and manipulated by powerful financial megacorporations. Make no mistake - the era of the nation-state is ending and the era of the market-state is beginning and the decisions we make now about what kind of limitation on power to build into the system will be felt for centuries to come.
This is a dystopia. No thanks!
What's the best use case that you care to name?
> It also happens to be rife with scams, mania, wildly non-useful projects, and all the rest. Just because it has terrible parts
This is the argument that "sure, 98% of it is crap, but there's good too".
Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification.
Censorship and central authority-resistant value transfers are worth it alone, in my eyes. Coming up second is the ability for money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust the execution of that program. Those are both primitives upon which pretty cool stuff can be built.
>Or put differently: "I've seen 98 scams in a row, so this increases the odds that the next ones that I see won't be a scam!" It's a conclusion in search of a justification.
I think it's OK to believe in the core value of an area that also has a lot of scams. When they first invented electricity there were an enormous number of conmen who sold miraculous electro-cures for ailments, etc. It's just because people are interested in new technology, so operating scams in new technology is a good way to find people you can scam. In 50 years all the scams will revolve around whatever newfangled technology exists then, it's a pretty basic human pattern. Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not.
IMHO: No and no.
> money to be programmable in a way that both parties can trust
is is a) money and b) how has that trust (AKA bug bounty) worked out?
> Find the society-altering technology of the time and there will be people trying to deceptively use it to their own benefit, whether it hurts someone else or not.
And the fact that it is full of scams does not make it "the society-altering technology of the time"
> “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Is it legal? Maybe not. I'm not necessarily concerned with whether transfers are legal or not. From my point of view the most important property is that transfers of value work. Issues of whether governments approve of those transfers is less important to me.
Are crypto transfers a good solution? Absolutely yes, IMHO. The fact that so much illegal transfer happens over, for example, Monero is the proof in the pudding that it is a good solution.
Work that through, "it's illegal banking infrastructure, but it works" and you assume that it's a) legit, not a scam, and b) it's going to continue working long-term despite being illegal. How is the appropriate regular going to fit in, or not? IDK why you have not joined the dots.
> Are crypto transfers a good solution? Absolutely yes, IMHO.
Comparted to what? Wise.com? SEPA (EU) ? NIBSS (Nigeria) M-pesa?
If you're saying "but we don't have those, so.." then you're implying that better non-crypto solutions do exist in the world. Crypto is yet another attempt to "use technology to solve a social problem" that is best addressed another way.
Vitalik mentions that he's interested in both approval voting and quadratic voting. He seems to say that quadratic voting is exciting because it's "more optimal" in a certain sense, compared with score voting. But Will Jarvis highlights the tension between optimal vs easy-to-understand:
Jarvis: "And is there [...] a trade off [...] between a system that’s more optimal, but it’s harder to explain and kind of illegible to people to one that’s easy to explain, and somewhat easier to implement."
Is the implication that Buterin likes quadratic voting more in principle, but he supports approval voting because it's easier to explain and implement? I wish they'd spent more time on this section!