Comment by krrrh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krrrh | Hacker News Reader

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The world computer idea does help to understand it. If you are playing a game or running some other processes on your discrete computer sometimes you accidentally pin the CPU, RAM, and IO, then you’ll run into issues where copying files to a USB disk or even doing simple things like editing cells in Excel becomes next to impossible until you force quit some applications.

In the “world computer” known as Ethereum, operations are prioritized via “gas” payments in ETH. A bunch of people you don’t know on the other side of the world might get interested in trading drawings of cats with each other[1], and suddenly the “world computer” has no resources available, and the cost of inserting simple records into the “world database”, or moving some tokens to an exchange suddenly goes from $2 to $50, or $500. This can happen right in the middle of an operation so you have to be careful to consult “gas prices” and probably the I Ching wouldn’t hurt, and then kind of make a guess and hope your transaction doesn’t get stranded.

If you have some tokens you want to get out of your wallet and you don’t have any ETH in the wallet to pay for the transaction you may need to beg, borrow, or steal some, and you’ll almost certainly be left with some dollars worth in your wallet that you may never be able to empty completely.

Imagine what it would have been like to work on a big timeshare mainframe in the sixties where booking time to do simple things cost massive sums of money, except that the bids for resources can come in from all over the world and things are being repriced constantly.

People like to call this decentralized, because no one is in control, but it actually centralizes the allocation of resources in a way that makes things many multiple times more expensive than they should be.

[1] The “world computer” is not actually trading images, because that would be impossible given its limited compute resources, so all of the hard stuff like transmitting or decoding a gif is actually happening on the normal internet and discrete computers. The “world computer” is just spending tonnes of resources recording which user currently “owns” the cat via a database entry.

Just to expand on a few points:

Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking: This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade. Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating gas fees.

On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into, scalability has been the main point of research for the past 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see improvements over the next few months and the rest of the year leading up to pos.

On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger, but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now, but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there is significant demand for that security.

The decentralisation is about resilience of the system, security of the information, and transparency (but not surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc) but we can try create systems that allow people to work together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out from under them when they need it. There are payment networks for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt for your own community, there are quadratic funding mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there is good work being done to actually help people. CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me over. That is valuable to me.

I’ll admit to being a bit facetious in my comment, but I really appreciated your thoughtful reply. There are definitely cases where the extra expense and inefficiency is worth it because of being able to route around broken centralized systems, but there are also a lot of things where there a trusted central authority is likely (NBA trading card presume the existence of a league), and maybe even necessary (UBI?). One of the early hyped examples of an Ethereum based app was a car sharing system, but there was never really a good explanation about why this couldn’t be done better with traditional brokers and servers.

Too often there is a lot of hand waving around this tech and a reluctance to admit and account for the serious trade-offs. It’s hard to have a realistic discussion because there are too many people talking up their book, either ETH holders themselves or even worse, VCs

For sure, I completely understand the resistance a lot of people have to cryptocurrencies and blockchains, I imagine they can seem invasive or unnecessary to people who imagine them being imposed in their communities. The side people generally hear about is people speculating and making/losing money. The hyper-capitalism unregulated markets can be off putting to people because in some ways it is the worst of the society that we already have, but personally i see the tech as being very useful for social-democracy and allowing us new ways of working together and handling this money stuff that might actually help us escape that capital led world.

I'm definitely in the camp of it being up to those of us who work in the space to prove our point and deliver on what we've been saying. I really believe we are getting to at least delivering the tech that might make the ideas possible to explore at scale.

There will be waves of mania, price bubbles, bad crypto ideas, and the general internet scammers, but hopefully something good comes from it all. And I expect the space to be belittled and rejected until it is able to show its value, probably rightly so, we have big promises to live up to.

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