Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

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Multisigs, permissionless lending, decentralized data storage, automated market makers, social protocols, exchangeable token based authentication, digital content ownership, digital rights management, etc. All of these things already exist on the platform.

Feel free to do some research if you have an open mind: Gnosis Safe: https://gnosis-safe.io/ Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/ Lens: https://www.lens.xyz/ Lit: https://litprotocol.com/ GMX: https://gmx.io/#/ Filecoin: https://filecoin.io/ Arweave: https://www.arweave.org/ Aave: https://aave.com/ USDC: https://www.circle.com/en/usdc

There's over $100B in USD backed currency alone on the Ethereum blockchain. It's programmable, liquid, exchangeble 24/7, interacts with thousands of smart contracts, and increasingly will be used for day to day commerce in addition to financial investment applications.

You are pseudo-anonymous on Ethereum. It's free to spin up new accounts and you can always fund them from a centralized exchange if you want Paypal-like privacy. Even then, there are solutions in the works for privacy:

https://aztec.network/

Cheers.

>Multisigs, permissionless lending, decentralized data storage, automated market makers, social protocols, exchangeable token based authentication, digital content ownership, digital rights management, etc. All of these things already exist on the platform.

And all of these either shouldn't exist or can be done better without a blockchain.

It is a solution without a problem.

Anonymous (or pseudonymous), independently verifiable operations with digital goods are clearly in demand. There may exist a better solution, but blockchain works now.

The demand for e.g. NFTs is rapidly dwindling. Most of the crypto currency space is driven purely by greed, fueled by gwt rich quick schemes. With the downturn of many economies peoples expendable income dwindled and so did their desire to buy a link to an image.

What actual problem does a blockchain solve?

For me personally, it's a low-fee payment system that can't be blocked and doesn't require any KYC. My friends and I use it primarily as a replacement for cash when we split restaurant bills abroad. There are people who use it to donate funds to organisations under repressive regimes anonymously.

Blockchain is just a useful primitive to build stuff on top of it. As an engineer, I would like to embrace it, NFTs notwithstanding.

My bank account has no fees and I am legally entitled to having one. (Unlike crypto exchanges where you can get booted off for any reason) My bank account also has the awesome property of not broadcasting my entire payment history.

Besides, I even said that money is perhaps (definitely not BTC or Eth though) the one area where a blockchain actually solves a problem which might exist.

What else is there? NFTs are a truly stupid idea.

In most countries, banks can freeze your funds or kick you out for any reason, unlike crypto where you can’t have assets frozen if you are holding Bitcoin or DAI non custodially. Many banks have monthly fees, charge for international transfers, invest and loan your capital and give you back almost no interest, and there have been a few high profile data breaches that would not be possible in a private chain like Monero.

You are pretty much ignoring what I said. Monero is pretty much the only somewhat sane implementation of a cryptocurrency, although even in crypto space it is quite a niche coin.

“Increasingly will be used…”

When will the crypto community finally quit with “it’s still early”?

Bitcoin is 13 years old. Ethereum is seven years old. Tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in the ecosystem.

Please look at block explorers across L1s, L2s, and side chains for daily transactions, unique addresses, etc.

User adoption is abysmal and that says it all.

I was really excited about cryptocurrencies and blockchain until I woke up one day and realized a decade has gone by and outside of gambling on crypto exchanges and people who make it their identity the entire thing could disappear tomorrow and literally 99% of the population wouldn’t know the difference.

Well, the Web was 7 years old in 1996, the Internet itself probably older (multiple potential beginning years for the Internet as we know it), and at that point they were still pretty confidential...

(Not to say that blockchains will have a huge success, but it's also not like progress hasn't been happening, haven't they managed to work out viable proof of stake recently?)

In 1990 15% of US households even had a computer (the highest percentage in the world). A small number of those had a modem or were otherwise web capable. Modems alone were roughly $1,000 (inflation adjusted) in 1990. When I first got on the internet in 1994 the computer was $5000 (inflation adjusted). Mosaic wasn’t even released until 1993…

The growth of the web also depended on laying many millions of miles of fiber that required everything from digging up entire countries to dispatching ships to cross the world’s oceans. Millions more phone lines, ISP modem banks in almost every phone central office in the country, etc. A truly monumental and expensive effort of humanity.

In 2015 68% of the US population owned a smartphone. 85.5% of US households had the internet. Data is cheap, reliable, fast, and plentiful. Billions of users are interacting on social media platforms to enable communication and spread ideas across the globe more quickly than ever before.

In 2015 these billions of people could catch a random Tweet, news story, etc and be counted as an Ethereum user in minutes for free or close to it.

See the difference?

Sure, I do: https://etherscan.io/chart/address

Steady growth of 50K-150K addresses per day. We're up to 210M addresses on ETH.

Sorry to report we haven't hit the tail end plateau of S-curve adoption yet.

Address != user and we both know it's trivial to generate as many addresses as you want.

Here's another chart:

https://etherscan.io/chart/active-address

All time high is 1m addresses actually used in any 24 hour period, which is a significant outlier. The average is closer to 400k-500k.

And another:

https://etherscan.io/chart/tx

1.7m ATH daily transactions with the average being around 1m. I'm not exactly a statistician but a simple breakdown could be 500k people doing two transactions per day. Factoring in adoption is likely heavily weighted towards individual users (in the DAU sense) transacting with multiple addresses I think it's safe to assume the mapping between active addresses and users is some fraction - 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc.

Being conservative and favoring Ethereum in this 250k DAUs for total on-chain activity encompassing all activity across the entire platform.

You can look at cheap and "high" traffic sidechains, L2s, etc and pretty quickly determine that the number of DAUs across the entire ecosystem is in the low single digit millions at best. To be really fair let's say it's 10m - that's .02% of internet users daily.

Even if we use your total addresses and assume each address is a user 210m users across the 5b people on the internet represents an adoption rate of 4.2% of internet users ever transacting with the network across the seven years of existence.

In my original comment I said 99% of internet users wouldn't notice if it all disappeared. Looking at the numbers I think this was charitable.

So yeah, abysmal.

>Aztec is on the cutting edge of zero-knowledge SNARK development. Built on PLONK — the paradigm-defining universal zk-SNARK used by leading zero-knowledge projects like Mina, Dusk, Zcash, and zkSync.

I have an open mind about this area and a technical background. I really struggle to understand what any of this means and what I can use it for. My experience with cryptocurrency (paying for things) has been challenging. As the whole ecosystem is very fragmented it's hard to know what to explore.

Zk-Snark means Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge.

It's fairly cutting edge cryptography. It is very fragmented as the industry is rapidly evolving. If I may recommend, a good article on zk Snarks from Vitalik: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html

ZK proofs allow you to prove you know the answer to something without revealing the answer itself. You may not need to know how these things work at a low level. If you're interested, feel free to dig into zk proofs and the cryptography behind them. The subject is quite deep and rapidly evolving. Ultimately, the important thing to know at a high level is that you can post a zk proof with just a few bytes of data, and that zk proofs, while computationally expensive to generate, are computationally cheap to verify. So they are being used as a blockchain scaling technology, since data storage is expensive on blockchains.

If you're just interested in crypto as a user, I would generally recommend getting a Metamask wallet and interacting with some applications like Uniswap, Aave, or OpenSea.

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