Ethereum should be ok withering away to make way for new crop. It's a tainted chain.
it seems like these new chains just exist to sustain the illusion of newness, and the creation of new shitcoins on new platforms, giving the idea of opportunity but actually just allowing the same shovel sellers (CEXs/miners/validators) to take in fees on gambling.
and i think decentralization is a meme topic. at best you have a handful of insiders in a PVP stalemate, at worst you end up in a fractured tribal warfare and liquidity vampirism.
The Bitcoin project (BTC) failed and is now call Bitcoin Cash (BCH) which is doing great as p2p cash but it turns out no one cares about p2p cash, just cash.
Oh, wait.
That world does require new tools to ascertain ownership of digital assets (since a lot of people will make their living through creating/selling these assets) and paying for digital assets (global commerce requires global and open payment systems).
At least crypto is trying to fix this problem
It is not. It is pretending to do that. But every single person still in crypto is there mostly for speculation, get rich quick schemes. Or they are holding bags that they hope will go back to a previous value.
The oracle problem has not been solved. Without it, crypto is just an interesting distributed algorithm. But it is not a revolution.
IMO trusting people is fine, good even. The higher trust you have between people the fewer contracts you need, the lower friction you have to cooperate. Blockchain exists only to transact in a zero trust environment, when you don't want to know the people you're transacting with, and you don't want them to know you. This is why it empowers scammers and traffickers more than the average person who isn't trying to participate in an economy without a name or address or liability.
The oracle problem has had an obvious solution all along (for most relevant usecases): the legal system. Just because you need the governments where the real assets are located to play along doesn't diminish the value of open, programmable, transactional transfers of ownership. Indeed, a lot of the process around buying something like a house is to try to emulate software in human institutions. Canonical registers of ownership recognised by legal systems are typically digital anyway these days, just not publicly digital. If the legal system recognises the blockchain as the canonical record of ownership for a class of asset, then there is no oracle problem (I think democracies should be getting their politicians to look at this, but in the meantime, depending on your jurisdiction there are often things that you can do with trusts that amount to the same thing).
On top of that, intellectual assets and digital native assets are increasingly important, and there is no oracle problem for such assets.
> But every single person still in crypto is there mostly for speculation, get rich quick schemes
This is such a weak argument, and thoroughly untrue. Of course, there are many people with those motivations, just as many people engage with the fiat currency world with those motivations, but it doesn't take long to ascertain that that is not the primary motivation of people like myself or the author of this blog.
True.
> That world does require new tools to ascertain ownership of digital assets (since a lot of people will make their living through creating/selling these assets) and paying for digital assets (global commerce requires global and open payment systems).
... Why?
The only things crypto has been truly innovative in paying for is illicit pornography and drugs. And like, the second one I don't have issue with, but the solution there is not to create an entire secondary financial system that burns down rain forests to execute transactions. The solution is to decriminalize drugs and use the existing financial system to pay for them.
And even the owning/selling of digital assets point rests upon a single chain ending up the "winner" of this strange competition they've been holding for decades. Okay, so you "own" this piece of art on the Ethereum network. What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? Or more fun still, what if someone just mints another of the thing you own on the same chain? Nobody is stopping them.
> At least crypto is trying to fix this problem
No it's not. It's a casino pretending to be a bank and telling you poker chips are money. Step outside said casino and try to buy a hot dog, and you'll realize the problems quite quickly.
When can we expect this utopia to be ushered in? What about paying for abortions? Sex work? Hosting of Kiwi Farms? There is no future where all these contentious decisions will align with your preferences. You can either throw your support behind the prohibitions that the collective enforces, or you can support an escape valve for individuals to defy it.
> What if someone contends they own it on the Tezos chain, or any one of the hundreds if not thousands of other ones? Or more fun still, what if someone just mints another of the thing you own on the same chain? Nobody is stopping them.
NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide. The chain just ensures that you get to own a token until you decide you no longer want it. No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home.
I 100% support individuals defying illegitimate laws. I did so twice in the last few months. I did not require cryptocurrency to do it and presenting either supporting prohibitions I disagree with -OR- supporting cryptocurrency is a false dichotomy.
We already have an untraceable value credit system in place for transacting illicit things. It's called cash, and it predates even the financial markets that crypto alleges to be trying to replace (while tripping over themselves to continue having access to the real financial system which incidentally is the main way crypto becomes non-anonymous because cryptocurrency cannot in fact create wealth it can only move it around from the actual financial system it claims to oppose, but that's a whole other thing entirely).
If it's a release valve as you say, then it is a release valve bolted to the side of an oppressive financial plumbing system, and is therefore reliant upon it. It is not salvation, is it at best, a new set of masters who have different preferences to the old. Perhaps an improvement (sex work) perhaps merely a different sort of monster (hosting kiwifarms) but nevertheless, not freedom. Just a different puppeteer with a different set of strings.
> NFTs don't work this way; the goal is not for the chain to tell you which token is "real", whatever that means. That's up to you to decide.
THEN WHAT DOES IT MATTER!? I have decided I own the Brooklyn Bridge. May I now list it for sale on Zillow?
Ownership as a concept only functions as a social contract with everyone else who shares your reality. I can SAY I own whatever the fuck I want, that is meaningless, utterly without value at all, if the person I'm attempting to sell it to does not recognize my ownership first, which for anything of value requires documentation. I own my home, because my name is on the deed, and it's also worth noting that I don't really, because the property is actually owned by a mortgage company, to whom I pay money. Nevertheless, I could sell my home, and then use the proceeds to pay off that mortgage company, and then take what's left and pocket it. But that entire arrangement depends on a contractual legal system with it's origin of trust in, ultimately, the Federal Government and judicial system, and because cryptocurrency is allergic ideologically to centralization (which isn't to say centralization isn't rife through the entire ecosystem anyway, because as it turns out, you kinda need central resources to use, well, anything) they refuse to do this.
> No one cares that you print your own versions of valuable pokemon cards at home.
In fact people do care! If you sold counterfeit Pokemon cards to a collector, you could be sued in civil court and possibly charged with fraud for misrepresenting goods! Not to mention sued by the holder of that intellectual property for reproducing it without their permission.
Maybe they can't recover their money under this stupid system, perhaps that's true, but that only matters if literally all your assets are in crypto. If you have a car, they can take that. If you have a home, they can take that. If you have $50 to your name in a checking account, they can take that and burden you for life with debt for whatever that doesn't cover. And in the event you manage to somehow crypto your entire life and they "can't touch you," you then go to jail because while everything is else beyond the reach of the feds (kind of) YOU, as in the physical manifestation of you, are not.
Up to the point where you leave this ecosystem, you have "money" in ethereum. Once you cross that threshold, you have *jack shit.* Actually you have less than jack shit, because you're down whatever real money you exchanged for fake money on the promises of whoever convinced you to buy into it.
Sure, cash is great. I hope we get to keep it, but it seems clear we'll need to fight for that. It has advantages over crypto, and but also obvious limitations. Cash and crypto are both tools that provide some measure of freedom to individuals. It's not only about laws you perceive as illegitimate. It's that all laws are unjust to some degree some of the time.
All I am saying is there is no future where drug legalization replaces the need to have cash - or crypto.
> Ownership as a concept only functions as a social contract with everyone else who shares your reality.
Right, and that's exactly how NFTs work? There are a bunch of enthusiasts who share a common belief, namely that tokens minted on a blockchain - by an artist purporting to represent an artwork they created, or a collectible purporting to represent a community - have a value.
If you create your own token purporting to represent someone else's artwork, this community won't value it, nor will they be bothered by it.
I don't fully understand the remainder of your point; if someone sold you a crypto token while making false representations as to what you are getting, you can try to sue them in court, and I would hope you'd win that case. That's a feature of our legal system. If you don't know the identity of the seller, or they aren't in your jurisdictions reach, you may have some trouble getting your judgement enforced. That's a property of a bearer asset.
OH COME OFF IT. There is not a Government on this planet that wants to get rid of cash. We've been TRYING to get rid of the PENNY in the United States for actual decades because it's fucking useless and we can't even manage that, and you think there's a future where we get rid of all of physical currency? Go outside!
Like telling people to touch grass is low-key shitty but Jesus Christ, I will never, ever get over how talking to crypto people is talking to fucking aliens. Y'all are trying to build a new financial sector for the entire economy and you don't know a SINGLE. THING. About doing that. You've build an admittedly quite impressive hammer in the form of cryptography in the form of currency, and based on that, you just assume everything else is merely a simple nail, ready to be driven by it. It is EXHAUSTING.
> All I am saying is there is no future where drug legalization replaces the need to have cash - or crypto.
Crypto is useless as currency! Absolutely useless. It's market volatility makes it PURELY a speculative vehicle as it's liable to change value by orders of magnitude between when you order something and when you pay for it, meaning accepting it as payment for anything is fraught with returns with negotiations with pending balances or refunds, each of which can re-occur in itself. A currency that is more stable and operates with lower fees is only that because of it's lack of adoption. As one gains users and traction and becomes attractive to speculators, it becomes both more expensive to use, slower in operation, and the value begins spiking and crashing because of those things. And that's not an "unfortunate side effect" or whatever, THAT'S what TO THE MOON MEANS. That's the GOAL of all these projects is to drive the value through the ceiling and cash out.
> Right, and that's exactly how NFTs work? There are a bunch of enthusiasts who share a common belief, namely that tokens minted on a blockchain - by an artist purporting to represent an artwork they created, or a collectible purporting to represent a community - have a value.
> If you create your own token purporting to represent someone else's artwork, this community won't value it, nor will they be bothered by it.
Except, again, that's not the situation. The absolute explosion of art theft and the enthusiastic participation of crypto users with it seems to indicate nobody really gives even a slight shit about owning real art, apart from being able to resell it later at a higher price. Tokens minted of the same pieces, tokens minted by people who aren't the artist, tokens minted of work from DECEASED artists, name it, it was made, it was sold and is probably still being traded today.
Like I'm willing to grant you just might not know this because you seem to be quite detached from reality, but I cannot overemphasize the GULF between what you think is happening and what is actually happening. It's PROFOUND.
> I don't fully understand the remainder of your point; if someone sold you a crypto token while making false representations as to what you are getting, you can try to sue them in court, and I would hope you'd win that case.
No, you can't. Because the thing they sold had no value, because they didn't own it. They sold you a receipt for a purchase of a thing that isn't real. Therefore, no court is gonna do shit.
> OH COME OFF IT. There is not a Government on this planet that wants to get rid of cash.
It is a real civil rights concern:
- https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/say-no-cashless...
- https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/710118/6bab368611007...
These aren't exactly cryptobros.
> Tokens minted of the same pieces, tokens minted by people who aren't the artist, tokens minted of work from DECEASED artists, name it, it was made, it was sold and is probably still being traded today.
Not really. Copy-minting did happen extensively, but it's more like phishing emails trying to get someone to click. No one really minted or traded these tokens. There were one or two projects based on stolen artworks that had a modicum of traction, but none that I know that is relevant today.
Feel free to proof your point by citing examples if you think you can.
> No, you can't. Because the thing they sold had no value, because they didn't own it. They sold you a receipt for a purchase of a thing that isn't real. Therefore, no court is gonna do shit.
Just one example: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/are-nfts-property-stol...
This would be very easy to establish - the creator would have a minting hash, and that hash would have a date and time.
If I create a piece of art and mint it on Ethereum with my wallet, it would be easy to prove that I own it, vs someone else copy-pasting the image and minting it two days later on Tezos.
Without an authoritative chain that is the chain, it doesn't matter.
In the real world, you used to authenticate things through signatures. In the digital world, you would do that by signing transactions with your known wallet.
This complaint is out of date for ethereum, the cryptocurrency system under discussion. The carbon footprint of an ethereum transaction is now about the same as watching two hours of youtube according to https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption and that's for the L1 - say you use Argent on Zksync as an example L2, you're most likely saving even more energy.
And before you go to cite crypto using green energy sources: so fucking what? It's wasting energy that wasn't produced with fossil fuels, big fucking deal, now the people who could've used that energy might well need to use fossil fuel-based energy sources to make up what ethereum converted into heat in server rooms which was then cooled by air conditioning to play their monopoly money game. Great, terrific, awesome.
And, while 22/1 is infinitely better than 160,000/1, that's still 22 times more energy used to facilitate the transfer of funds, which we already have methods to do more efficiently.
Whatever blockchains could have been, the establishment prevented actual utility as much as possible while simultaneously scammers and no-value-marketers proliferated.
Vitalik has talked a lot about why he believes L2s to be the best answer to the centralisation-security-scaleability trilemma.
It's absolutely not just sustaining the illusion of newness, the L2s on the ethereum chain are aiming to provide the same security promises of the main chain, but with an order of magnitude reduction in transactions fees [1]. Something that is important for the wide adoption that blockchains originally claimed was their aim.
There are already phenomenal L2 chains for specific purposes (transfers, decentralised exchanges etc), and the next generation of fully flexible L2 chains built on ZK technology are available (but with various 'use at your own risk' / alpha disclaimers for now) [2].
As for decentralisation, there is a spectrum of possibilities, but if the goal is to provide the next financial platform for the world, some level of decentralisation is not optional.
For-profit corporations, subject to the whims of the market, the ego of a CEO and the latest management trend simply cannot guarantee the stability and longevity that a serious attempt at a financial platform would need. On top of that, there needs to be a credible claim that the platform is neutral to the apps that run on it. Can you name a big finance company you'd trust to do that?
[1] https://l2fees.info/
[2] https://l2beat.com/scaling/summaryI'm not sure that the expensive transactions in ETH are something entrenched interests are willing to do away with.