fredfoobar

Satoshi fixed a bug (that reverted it back to the initial rules everyone agreed upon).

The DAO hack actually was an exploitation of the rules that everyone agreed upon in the DAO, recursively calling a function in your smart contract layer is not a bug.

This brings us to an interesting topic, bugs are common in software,

* Should you make the protocol layer so complex that it increases the probability of bugs being found, being harder to understand and potentially grind the whole system to a halt if a bug is found.

OR

* Should you break them up into layers where each layer has one responsibility (base monetary layer, a smart contract layer, a micro payments layer etc.)

When there is a prominent founder, everyone usually tends to defer to them (in this case, Vitalik, see what happened to ETC vs ETH).

How can you verify that? currently everybody just listens to what he has to say, when he decided to undo the DAO hack, the original "immutable" chain just died off because Vitalik put his vote on ETH. Sincerely, I really wish he hadn't done that.

(I'm guessing vbuterin is THE vbuterin here)

> Our current financial system doesn't give people the ability to independently verify anything at all; it's even worse than the most centralized chains in that regard.

I'm sorry, that sounds incorrect, many people have been "verifying" things independently and sounding the alarm, but nothing happens.

Yeah yeah, everything can always be changed in the future.

looks like you missed "controls a large percentage of total ETH"

> Bitcoin already uses a very high percentage of the total energy that the global financial services industry does, and it moves a very small amount of money around to show for it.

Citation needed.

Citation that counters that perception: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...

> If the bitcoin network were to move quadrillions of dollars per year, it would probably have to use more energy than we are capable of producing

Sigh, this gets spouted like it's the truth by people who don't understand the simple fact that the energy usage in bitcoin is NOT used on transactions! and it DOES NOT scale with the number of transactions!. [1]

> And bitcoin cannot offer insurance, or retirement and estate planning, it cannot take my company public or help me raise money on the bond market. It cannot facilitate a repo transaction on my real estate portfolio, and it cannot offer me a mortgage to purchase a home.

These are the usecases for subsequent layers, and there are services popping up for these already! bitcoin is a relatively young system that is purely community driven.

[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/frustrating-maddening-all-consuming...

I'm here to help that transition, It's already happening, many folks I know are transitioning to a hardware wallet. I've personally helped people onboard on to lightning and running their own node.

The whole process of running your own node has improved so much nowadays: getumbrel.com comes to mind.

You're somehow implying that bitcoin can't do that, how'd you come to that conclusion.

[responding to the pre-edit question about PoW] I just did, you don't need any capital to run a node. The book documents an incident where there was majority hash-rate (miners) wanting to change the rules against the wishes of the users.

more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k

> Compare this to PoW, where only 51% of hashrate needs to be participating/complicit to censor certain transactions, the other 49% have no way of fighting back, and the only tool the community has to fork away is to change the PoW algorithm.

This is just such a small part of the whole equation.

1. They can't continuously attack with this, as you need to expend energy as long as you want to continue with the attack.

2. Even if you have majority hash-rate, you can't change the rules of the system (this has already happened)

There's a whole book written about the history of this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-w...

"Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn’t matter in the decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes & told them to go f*ck themselves." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763084...

Thanks, A carbon tax will be a boon for stranded/wasted energy as well, I wouldn't see why a bitcoin mining operation can't use better sources of energy to mine and be more profitable. It's based on consuming electricity for starters (not natural gas), unlike say ICE vehicles which can't switch to another source of energy.

Yeah, now you are proposing a system that is going to be secured purely on that stake everyone acquired, THAT's the issue.

https://bisq.network/ exists, you can trade bitcoin p2p already.

The crux of it is that you can't rewrite history trivially, you have to expend a lot energy to change history, and energy can't be created nor destroyed.

For something specific to bitcoin/blockchain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0

No, that wasn't my gripe. Bitcoin is a decentralized technological solution that almost completely replaces the banking system, I'd prefer that over the current Banking system, and bitcoin is global to boot.

Transaction per day -> it can do as many as you want. I run a lightning node and I've shown a lot of people how quick and cheap the transactions can be, and also how EASY it is to get setup to transact in bitcoin over lightning.

Sir, this has been discussed extensively whenever it comes up. Who will slash the slashers??

Just THINK about the complexity you're introducing, you're just obfuscating the system more and more to just avoid some loopholes, while not eliminating it either.

Why is there such a strong status-quo bias among people I thought were technologists, and what do you guys defend? the banking system?? really?

Do you all remember the energy FUD that the internet got back in the late 90s [1]?

Please! lets not sleepwalk into another PoS system on the internet to replace the previous one.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=3e2...

Sorry, it was more for your "opinion" on PoW, not the carbon tax.

> This would immediately make unproductive energy use (cough POW crypto cough) a lot less profitable,

You seem to have just one target in mind that would get hit. Clearly you haven't analyzed the full extent of a "carbon tax" and your following statement seemed very naive. That said, I'm all FOR carbon taxes, it is actually good for Bitcoin and the world.

I don't think there will be a LOT of PoW cryptos, there will be one (or two at most) winner and the others will use a variation of Proof of Proof (by saving state on a PoW chain). I also think that the energy usage curve will plateau soon-ish and energy usage will be somewhat constant or start trending down gradually (as the rewards are tapering off too).

Everything in this universe is analogous to Proof of Work, it's the most natural system out there. If there is a base monetary layer for the internet, it should be Proof of Work based (and Bitcoin, because it's got the most work done to improve the technology + network effects).

Consider not rabbitholing into a narrative and understanding reality:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...

Yeah, nope.

Consider the amount of energy wasted right now and also in similar "industries".

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-uses-less-than-...

There is no place for a PoS protocol layer on the internet, I'm willing to die on this hill.

Not to mention the cavalier attitude towards their tokenomics (quite literally monetary policy now), how often they can change it. It simply doesn't inspire confidence. A monetary layer should be immutable once a good set of rules have been found to be working well.

Just think about it, if a protocol layer on the internet changes its protocol parameters based on some trends, is it a good idea? Bitcoin is like another protocol layer on the internet protocol stack, you build other layers on top of the base monetary layer. You reduce the possibility of bugs in a layer disrupting the whole ecosystem and make the layer more maintainable.

The negative consequences were mentioned in another comment:

You should first get "well versed into PoS systems", The stakers (and their adjoints) can collude and decide to reorg the chain for a different outcome. This can be done indefinitely at no additional cost.

In a PoW system, you not only have to expend capex for mining equipment, you hare further discouraged by the huge CONTINUED opex (energy) cost. The energy required to change the state of the chain is similar (or greater) than the energy it took to make the first version.

The HN narrative engine is so biased towards ETH that some are even asking for advice on where to buy ETH. This is ridiculous, just think through the consequences of a PoS system, you all are smart folks, I presume.

Holy shit, lol.

This is an insane take. Proof of Stake is NOT secure, the stakers can collude to reorganize the chain at almost no cost. This is like the exact system we tried to get away from, the USD system is also a Proof of Stake.

TBH, I believe we need another AI winter to come up with something better than the AI "black boxes" we have right now.