zeroclip

It's a distributed ledger, that you can deploy a computer program to. Use cases extend outward from there.

ERC721 is an EVM spec, how do you even propose achieving this kind of restriction in Solidity?

tokenURI aims to be flexible and unopinionated. It can be an inline SVG string generated by the Solidity contract itself, an IPFS link to a JPG, some app's custom protocol URI scheme, or a mutable HTTPS CDN like a game developer using NFTs but wanting to retain control over their assets.

Who said Ethereum aims to be as fast as a regular computer, or even a raspberry pi?

There is no single company driving the PR and marketing for Web3, so the term is whatever somebody wants it to be. But the vague way to describe it is an approach to building web apps with decentralized public blockchains and smart contracts, like DeFi or ENS.

Web3 is just "web with a sprinkle of crypto and blockchains." The problem space is narrow, and different than what DNS and HTTPS tries to solve. But its not useless, and probably will continue to grow as part of the web.

Down from peak but $500M monthly volume across 200K users is not bad really. This dashboard isn't tracking other chains and L2s, like Reddit's avatars that just crossed $10M sales volume.

https://dune.com/polygon_analytics/reddit-collectible-avatar...

It’s not the majority of stake that controls the chain, it’s the majority of honest users. Rich validators can collude to have 51% staking power and start to exert unwanted force, like censoring blocks for their own profit or doing something else unwanted, but the majority of honest users can decide to coordinate a soft fork and point their clients at a new chain. The controlling validators will only be rich on the old chain.

See [1].

$14B in illicit activity in a year sounds like a lot, but it's about a single percent of $1T, and Chainalysis is tracking $1T worth of transactions per month in crypto.[2]

[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...

[2] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/series-f/

“Richest get richer” could describe any form of capital investment in a risk-on asset that appreciates over time: buying gold, stocks, real estate, art, VC. If you have capital to place at risk in an investment that gives you a return*, you are “rich and getting richer.”

Unlike stocks and other investments, you don’t need a large amount of capital to receive a PoS reward, and there are less significant economy of scale. All validators receive an equal % return no matter how much Eth they deposit. Those without 32ETH capital can use pools and decentralized staking platforms to receive the same % return minus a small fee to the service who has the capital at risk and is doing the work to validate.

Opposite to a pyramid scheme: if more people join Eth deposit pool, everybody including early investors earns collectively less % reward on their stake, and the equation for this is explicit and known! And the staking deposit of each new entrant does not funnel back up to early entrants.

* Note: a lot of these investors are down since last year, not just Eth but stocks and other investments have crashed.

I assume you are not talking about the minority fee that goes to the validators for their services, but the majority fee that is burned in ETH after EIP1559.

When a limited supply token is burned, the total supply is reduced, and assuming that does not decrease the demand, then the value will diffuse to all token holders. If 75% of all PayPal or Wise fees were burned such that all users of PayPal had their account slightly appreciate in value whenever there is significant transactional volume in the network, a lot of users would be pretty into that.

Besides, this is just one way. Bitcoin does not burn fees, so it’s much more like the PayPal and Wise approach, no money leaving circulation.

0.01 ETH or less, through decentralized staking pools.

But your main argument is wrong: validators do not control the network. Users running node software do. Running a node is free. If a single validator began to exert unwanted control, the honest majority of non-rich users could slash or evict them.

um, no? How is it one?

Validators are paid mostly from protocol reward by placing their capital at risk and performing the necessary work to validate the network.

That’s not how PoS works.

Not the case with proof of stake.

Seems like you are saying that anything primarily relying on a permissionless and distributed consensus mechanism will not get a pass.

Yikes, I hope that people on HN would not defend such a decision this way.

That's not how the argument and poem[1] goes. If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?"

A lot of people building crypto tools also are happy to use centralized services like GitHub, SourceHut, GitLab, because they might not be satisfied with the alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

"Lots of stuff is bad and so all of it must be bad" is a weak argument. Look at email: 85% of mail is spam and scam.

If you read beyond the hype the use cases are very clear, even if they are very narrow: disintermediation, decentralization, and making permissionless payments and contracts.

Blockchains like Monero and zcash are pretty good ways to handle anonymous payments across the world, compared to sending cash in an envelope or trusting a third-party with your privacy. If Tor would be allowed on SourceHut even with its negatives, so should Monero and zcash. Monero and zcash were not built with the explicit goal to scam people, and they do provide features that were not easily achievable prior to this technology.

Lol, hilarious. I guess Endaoment and any EVM-based project would also not be permitted, then. Now I wonder what would pass this nebulous Drew-review.

Seems extremely arbitrary. Would ENS get a pass? What about Ethereum itself?

Is this real person also named Drew?

Take PayPal or Wise. User A sends $100 USD to User B, and the payment network takes a $1 fee. User A now has -$100 USD and User B has $99 USD. If you add -100 + 99 it might seem like money disappears, but that remaining $1 of value has gone to the network as a fee for services rendered, and it was something that both parties were willing to pay.

Even here, both users are short USD, but it is not a "negative sum" system as the users gain some positive value by having the payment processor transfer and secure their funds. If the only metric is how much USD a buyer has left, every visit to the bakery would be a negative sum game.

In the above example, PayPal and Wise are User C. In a permissionless blockchain, User A and B can both also opt to be validators and receive these protocol rewards, so there may not even be a User C that extracts rent on each transaction.

Seems like virtue signalling from an over-controlling project maintainer with a grudge against blockchains.

Can you make a coherent case for why a legitimate and licit application of crypto should not be allowed on your source hosting platform?

To give an example of a legitimate and licit application: Endaoment.

How is proof of stake a net negative on the environment?

I don’t understand your logic. Users pay 0.01 ETH for gas fees to perform some action like transfer USDC from A to B. Majority of that fee is burned but some small percentage goes toward a validator for their services. The price of Eth may even depreciate in the days or weeks that follow, leaving the validators with less fiat value than they had when this whole exchange began, and parties A and B are no worse off.

What is negative sum in this example?

Users get value out of sending tokens, holding stablecoins, and interacting with smart contracts. The price can go up or down but who cares, if they are using stable tokens or just using ETH to pay gas fees. They might be happy to part with a small amount, paying whoever is facilitating the transfers and helping run the network.

Just like how payment processors work like PayPal. They take a cut on each transaction. The difference with validators in a blockchain is that it’s permissionless.. Anybody in the room can participate and capture a % of these transaction fees.

Yes this idea is interesting.

Short of US-government sanctions, there is very little that can be done to tear down a permanent contract.

Even Tornado Cash still works and can be accessed and analyzed[1][2], the US government could not remove it or secretly embed a back door so their only option was to criminalize anybody who touches it, even honest users, something that is now being challenged in courts[3].

[1] https://twitter.com/liamzebedee/status/1578127982173908992

[2] https://dune.com/poma/tornado-cash_1

[3] https://www.coincenter.org/coin-center-is-suing-ofac-over-it...

Sorry but the statement "Not 'crypto' which is by and large a scam" is a common statement from Bitcoin maximalists who refuse to engage with the rest of the crypto currency system. "Crypto" is a broad umbrella and Bitcoin exists underneath it.

Aztec is live on mainnet:

https://aztec.network/

Parent is a Bitcoin maximalist, just to be mindful.

Currently it's about $0.85 USD to send ETH or $2.50 USD to send ERC20[1]. Most people will suggest not using a L1 as a payment system, but instead something application-specific like a rollup or state channel. In Ethereum those will be in the range of 5 - 20 cents per transaction[2], and may be much lower after EIP-4844[3].

Other non-Ethereum blockchains and L2s have similar range of low fees.

[1] https://etherscan.io/gastracker

[2] https://l2fees.info/

[3] https://www.eip4844.com/