The Roads Not Taken | Hacker News Reader

The Roads Not Taken

vitalik.ca

37 pointssidhanthp7 comments

I think this article portrays what I think is crypto’s biggest problem - the developers are all focusing on /trivial/ matters like preventing double-spend and ensuring economic finality.

And then, every time a hack happens they blame it on the users - “the blockchain wasn’t compromised”. Sure, but users don’t care about that technicality.

Crypto needs better UI/UX and real-world mainstream usecases, not better consensus algorithms.

I don’t think Vitalik et all understand this, outside of the small criticisms they’re willing to bring up to deflect crypto-skeptics.

Eg, POW’s environmental damage is mentioned once in this blog, as a positive that enabled ETH’s “accessibility”. This is a joke right? You can barely mine any ETH even on an rtx3090. Obviously, mining pools/farms and the resulting global GPU shortages are accessible.

Especially things like

> once a block gets finalized, it cannot be reverted without the attacker having to lose millions of ETH to being slashed

when most recent hacks are begging for reversibility.

Ironically, the hacker gains “millions of ETH” instead. The hack is enshrined in the blockchain forever, and if CEXs blocklist the hacker - the ETH sits dormant and wasted forever - and nobody can fix this without hard-forking. True innovation!

You may as well say that the Bank of England is too focused on making counterfeit proof banknotes, and actually they should be building door locks, making alarm systems, campaigning for police patrols etc.

These are two distinct problems completely.

Bank of England claims that barely 0.0022% of notes are counterfeit. [1] And that going digital is what’s driving YoY decreases.

If you claim that ETH’s role is purely to be a replacement for the BoE (which is debatable) - surely they’ve solved counterfeiting, and can move on other things? Do we need to bike shed this forever?

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/counterfeit-bankno...

Contextually unrelated, but the title compels me

https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

Highly recommend.

> What if the EVM was something totally different?

I'm not sure if Solidity's traps are the EVM's traps exposed at the higher level, but given how hard it is to write a robust VM, I can't see the EVM being based on existing implementations being a bad thing.

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