iskander

I haven't read the article yet but one thing that makes more complicated in the US is the widespread use of septic tanks. The leach field will flood before the actual surface.

At the same time, I think it's a lot to expect of people to wade through the feverish speculative bubble to make sense of what technology is interesting. I think it would be nice if some of this stuff started making its way out of currency associated blockchain projects and into the wider world of decentralized algorithms and protocols.

I think the evolution of "decentralized" infrastructure will start to bring out a lot more overlap between "traditional" decentralization communities (building stuff like Beaker browser) and some of the useful bits of crypto.

My experience with "Scala at scale" was extremely unsatisfactory and I found Databricks to give very unhelpful responses to basic performance problems arising from the intersection of Scala and Spark, bordering on gaslighting. Memory bloat is one of the most pernicious issues, you have to handle large data very carefully to not end up with massive memory footprints that outstrip any available hardware (and causes hard to debug cascading failures).

It depends on which chain you're using but somewhere between a few seconds (on Avalanche, Solana, and many other newer chains) and an hour (on Bitcoin, which is in my experience really not useful for anything).

...or a wallet to wallet transfer of USDC...

I'm in the US and it's a very messy and archaic system that involves paperwork, multiple human intermediaries and days to clear.

Trying to pay in Bitcoin or any other non-stable crypto asset sounds like a nightmare. I think that people rightfully don't do this anymore but instead use stable coins like USDC (https://www.circle.com/en/usdc).

Clarification for confused outsiders: crypto loans are over-collaterized using crypto assets. In case of non-payment, Aave won't come try to collect your house, instead they'll just keep some other crypto that you put up as collateral.

I treat the underlying "currencies" (ETH, Avax, Sol, &c) as speculative assets and do actual payments and other financial transactions in USD pegged stable coins.

Yep, it's hard/stressful for beginners but then you get used to it. I prefer it to any other method I've seen for large transfers.

>I own several crypto-currencies and there hasn't been a single moment in which I thought of buying something with a crypto-currency.

This is entirely personal and subjective, but I prefer the user experience of Aave and Yearn to traditional banking with e.g. Chase. I also would way rather make large purchases with crypto (e.g. down payment on a house) compared with wiring money.

>You can say this about anything that uses lots of electricity.

Yes. You can.

Let's actually generalize it to anything with an outsized carbon footprint (e.g. commuter flights, car dependent housing development, &c).

We will almost certainly continue doing that stuff but it's incompatible with any vaguely desirable ecological outcome. PoW crypto is special in that it is both highly optional (it's not essential to the lifestyles of 99.999% of people) and has easy substitutes.

This is a mix of climate denialism and Bitcoin religion.

1) A system that turns energy usage into $ will always gravitate towards the cheapest energy source (fossil fuels). Maybe we'll eventually figure out cold fusion, but for the next few decades it's pretty important to promote carbon neutral energy production even if it's more expensive while simultaneously cutting out gratuitous industrial scale waste like PoW mining.

2) "makes the protocol incorruptible and eternally open and permissionless for anyone to join as first class citizens, even late adopters". Ah yes, let me just fire up my warehouse full of ASICs connected to a dedicated power plant. Any old Joe could do it.

Interesting, hadn't heard of it before. What gets slashed in PoA? Is there some kind of quantified reputation that you lose through misbehavior?

>The digital blockchain, via proof-of-work, is thus connected to real-world natural resources.

This, in essence, is why any further adoption of PoW chains is deeply incompatible with climate change mitigation. I'm happy to see crypto mature into some kind of open source / open protocol financial system but it needs to happen strictly on proof-of-stake chains (whatever the challenges to decentralization).

You still need to make decisions in a decentralized system, I don't really see what alternative you're imagining that's even more decentralized than "start a parallel chain if you dislike it, let people vote with their feet". You can't really start a parallel USD to see if people like your monetary policy better.

And, obviously, this is political. Miners make a lot of money off the status quo, devs want to reduce the energy/environmental impact of their chain. Proof of stake takes away a moat that miners have built around their operation (now anyone with 32eth can be a validator). There's no way out of that conflict of interests without some degree of politics.

The two are often juxtaposed in the coverage of crypto bans, I don't know if they're also juxtaposed in the political intentions.

It's a joke about how universities have become administratively bloated and primarily function as a very expensive resort community for 18-22 year olds. To "compete" with each other, universities hire increase numbers of administrators whose job is to build out a more complete "college experience", including fancier gyms catering to modern exercise trends (aka climbing walls).

It would definitely have a lot more buy-in from banks if it were centrally sanctioned but I'm not sure if the functionality would be much different from a stablecoin on an efficient L2. I would personally rather have banks integrate with e.g. USDC on zkSync but I suspect that the lack of control is what makes that scenario undesirable for governments.

Miners already put up a fuss over some of preparatory changes for PoS and definitely don't like having to give up mining. They're free to run a parallel Ethereum chain of their own (which has already happened, most prominently with Ethereum Classic - $ETC). Everyone will have parallel balances on both chains from the point of departure. The cultural weight is with the developers however and all of the popular apps will use the proof of stake chain instead of whatever forks emerge from grumpy miners.

An interesting angle that seems overlooked in articles about India and China "banning" cryptocurrencies is that these efforts are often linked to a desire to create centralized digital currencies.

e.g. from this article: "India is also looking to make a framework for the official digital currency that will be issued by the Reserve Bank of India."

If you follow the Ethereum core developers on Twitter you can track the progress. Current status is (1) people have locked ~$30-40B worth of Ethereum into the proof of stake chain, money which can't be retrieved until the merge (2) the Ethereum team has a merged testnet running on which all the different client developer teams are participating. They're just hunting for edge case bugs now, too much money at stake to have anything go wrong with the merge.

The rest of your post is a very standard HN response to crypto, to the point where I'm not even sure if you wrote it or copied it.

I just want to respond to this:

>Proof-of-stake is basically a fantasy of how we'll solve PoW problems with a lot of hand-waving. It having not happened yet is pretty good evidence of this being a fantasy.

PoS is bog standard for new chains. Every "up and coming" chain is essentially a clone of Ethereum with some scalability improvements and proof-of-stake for consensus. See: Harmony, Luna, Avalanche, &c

>Nobody uses Defi to "borrow".

I mostly "use" crypto to keep USDC in DeFi sites like Aave for ~3-10% APY and some on Gemini for a FDIC insured 8% APY. This money primarily gets lent out for other people margin trading, but you don't really need to take on any of that risk for yourself.

A "deflationary instrument" with an issuance of 6.25 BTC per block...

Another cool startup idea would be a search engine for websites, where you type in keywords or phrases and the search engine returns relevant sites. I really hope someone implements this.

>The only value I can comprehend in all this is that of the ledger's utility in facilitating trading on the secondary market (since the artist doesn't need to go and vouch for everybody who eventually buys/sells the ownership stake in the bag of bits in the future).

The contract also automates royalties.

>It all feels gross to me. I can certainly appreciate that artists have to make a living, but the idea that the best way to do this is to crank out digital certificates to confirm somebody "owns" their work (but only in the sense that the "owner" can trade and speculate on that ownership stake) strikes me as bizarre and dystopian.

It's definitely weird and it's definitely a novel form of ownership -- I think the debate over whether NFTs are good/bad is really one over whether this new social convention will stick around. I can see why some people don't want it to.

>NFTs are not durable

Some of the more prized NFTs are entirely on-chain; I agree that ones which just encode a URL of an image feel very superficial and brittle.

>Scarcity is entirely illusory across ecosystems

Every successful ETH NFT has been copied (probably multiple times) on other chains; this isn't really any different from just even copying on the same chain. In all cases it's treated as a copy.

>There is no validation of copyright upon NFT creation

I agree and I think this is a huge problem for 1/1s!

> NFTs have not succeeded in a test within the courts

Best NFTs are CC0 licensed and don't confer any legal rights (but instead encourage liberal reuse and remixing)

It's kinda the opposite of DRM though, there's a strong culture of CC0 / public domain licensing in the NFT space. The idea is that you should be able to use and remix media freely but you can preserve a kind of monetary value through which artists get paid via a novel concept of ownership.