I think Vinay has great insights into gun control, the hexayurt, and some other topics, however, on ETH, I think he's totally in error. I'd be happy to livestream chat him about it.
Disclaiming the misunderstood "marketcaps:"
Crypto currency market cap descriptions are comedic. As soon as you actually try and sell your coins into the market, you see that you've eaten through the order book and driven the whole market down 10 percent. With thin markets like cryptocurrencies, if you market sell a million of coins, you actually make quite a large dent in the order book. Thus, a disclaimer should be included that crypto market caps are very not like the market caps you're used to seeing in the stock market.
The blockchain is not a way to "arrange a lot of computers to do the same thing." it literally is just a chain of blocks. Moving them is the nodes job, and you can sibil attack the nodes if you wish. ALso, when machines drop offline or get hacked, the network notices quite dearly, as I'm sure you noticed when your ETH network was non functional a couple times this year right? You guys [formed a choir and forgot the chorus] when you rolled back the dao transactions...
Please don't use the highest ever seen price to describe the block reward for mining, its usually not $500 every twelve seconds right?
"A smart contract is a tool for changing the world." So far it seems they've only changed thew world for the worse? Is there a successful smart contract yet? Is the net gain going to exceed the loss from those poor dev's that learned how easy it is for a program to do something you didn't think it would, and now all the money is gone. Maybe, or maybe you could use safer languages for the contracts.
"Systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum have many, many implementations. As long as they can all smoothly work together (and bugs at this level are, indeed, very rare) the whole thing works like a single machine. That nobody owns."
It is surely owned. The chain itself exists on drives that are owned, the nodes and their bandwidth is owned, bitcoin has *many implementations? hmm. If no one owns it, who are these people voting for BIP's? Seems like ownership to me. The coins, the nodes, the miners are owned, and they lobby.
"Nobody owns the internet, and we get along just fine." Some citizens don't have this view, or the freedom to see it.
"[btc]The mining thing rapidly centralized in the hands of a relatively small number of miners, " You are avoiding that in ETH how?
"The ideas behind Bitcoin certainly ran into trouble as they encountered regulation" avoiding that in ETH how?
"And this is the core vision of the Ethereum community: a world in which two people can deal directly with each other, and the systems that support their interaction don’t distort the message as they carry out our instructions. You say what you want, and the machines carry your instructions to the person on the other end of the deal. Directness is the real fruit of disintermediation: people dealing as they would face-to-face, but with the benefit of a network."
Uh. I think the darknets are doing this at scale already?
I don't think the libertarians will like this: "I went to Norway recently, and I suggested at a talk I did that we could move Scandinavia very quickly to experiments involving a blockchain for payments, fully supported by their government, on the basis that taxation could be built directly into the platforms they might use (it’s unlikely, today, the Norwegian government could collect taxes in Ether not Kroner!)." When the Russians take out your internet, I guess you just won't have commerce for a while.
Your arguments for a blockchain seem to support BTC better than they do ETH. Your arguments for peer to peer commerce seem to support the darknet markets more than they do ETH. You hand wave oracles with your "internet of agreements" You will end up with human judges. Oracles solution on its own is worth more than all crypto currently.
"I think Ether at $100 means that so many people believe in the world they think Ethereum will create, that it is becoming inevitable." Dogecoin appeared pretty inevitable for a while.
Smart contracts are seriously entirely useless unless you solve oracles. If you can't trust your oracle, you can't trust your contract. Period. No hand waving.
Thus. If you want to build crypto products that are useful, like shapeshift, timestamp, and lots of other things, great! Don't think that it is ETH that you need to make that happen. Also, what exactly do I need ETH for if I want to use the ETH network for all its dreamed majesty? Isn't all I need gas, and how correlated is gas likely to be with ETH? You have humans setting that relationship no? ETH is where smart people go to throw away their BTC gains.
That being said, you're a smart dude and I like lots of what you've worked on. If you have to trust a human, you'll need a human judge. If you want to not have judges, you need to not need to trust humans. If you dont' want to trust humans, than you must determine the state of the "real world" for your "smart contracts" to make decisions. That thing that measures the real world is an Oracle. Since your oracle can be cheated, or ddos'd or make a mistake, you're back to human judges again.
Until you can create a digital oracle that is trustworthy and can translate real world events into data to be plugged into logic in your smart contract, you are wasting your time. You will, end up with judges. Hell, the DAO didn't even get to fail at the oracle level, it failed before it even got to make its first "smart investment."
All the talk of smart contracts is merely hand waving away the oracle problem. All the talk of blockchains is sadly also hand waving of lots of issues as well, which is why we've really only seen one successful one, and some of it's users nearly have a gun to their head, so it's quite compelling for them to eat the risks and make it work.
Thus the more brain power and money power that go into things that are useful instead of smart contracts with no oracles, the happier I'll be.
>As soon as you actually try and sell your coins into the market, you see that you've eaten through the order book and driven the whole market down 10 percent. With
There is no way you could push down the market 10 percent today. Maybe back in 2011, or maybe in one of the lesser known cryptocurrency markets. But in Ethereum, you could unload a huge number of ETH and the price wouldn't budge. I'm assuming of course you're not an institutional trader, in which case of course Ethereum trading volumes are insufficient to absorb large trades without significant price movements.
>Smart contracts are seriously entirely useless unless you solve oracles.
Even a basic cryptocurrency transaction (sending ETH from Account 1 to Account 2) utilizes smart contracts. Having Turing Complete script evaluation just means the range of smart contracts possible becomes larger. So for example, schemes like Lightning Network are possible with Ethereum, without any changes to the protocol.
>There is no way you could push down the market 10 percent today.
GDAX fell about 8% yesterday, from $96.82 to $89.07 in one hour (May 4, 9-10am) with about $2 million worth of trades. It's a little early to call this a post-volatility era.
It's volatile alright, but that's not the same thing as being able to push the market down with a retail-sized trade, let alone push it down a staggering 10%. And just because the market dropped 8%, doesn't mean the drop can be attributed to $2 million worth of Ether put up for sale on GDAX.
The daily trading volume is $300 million at last count. There's arbitrage happening across exchanges so the price on one exchange is not isolated from what's happening on others.
Crypto is a hard space. Most people's startups have lost them money compared to what they would have made had they just bought btc and held. Other's have left the btc ship with predictions of failure (Falkvinge, Hearn) and their doom predictions haven't yet and perhaps may not come true. I feel that many the great mind is lost to boredom with boring old BTC, the crypto you can actually buy things with. This makes me sad, for surely BTC is not yet where anyone would like it to be. The braindrain has a cost.
Massive amounts of braindrain have funneled into ETH, and not just dev's but dollars. It's like 21 inc. They failed so hard that they pivoted into a payments layer. I literally paid them a 6 percent fee to send some BTC to their founder. I could have just sent him btc directly, but then they wouldn't have a profit model right?
Thus. Time and money can be wasted. I believe that much of ETH is such a waste. And even worse, it's actually a risk magnet that convinces others to do unsafe things, like tie millions of dollars up in smart contracts, that are quite unsmart.
Bitcoin's not exciting enough, so let's iterate all the xyz thing but with bitcoin ideas. They nearly all fail, so then we're on to, lets have shorter block times, or lets tie proof of work to something that's not electricity, like storage or selfies. Then there's the "smart" layers like colored coins, branded tokens, and mastercoin, and ETH which layers on itself.
So the situation is, everyone wants to get rich, but you can only get rich in crypto if you A. start with lots or B. Get in really early. Since most people don't start with lots, and most people aren't "early" to BTC, they venture into altcoin land, also known by a diminutive term I won't use here. You could C. ico, pump and dump as well.
Thus everyone wants to get in early, and get in on the pump, few want to work with boring, slow, nearly impossible to change BTC, corners get cut, and sheep get shaved.
The growing pains BTC had cost a couple orders of magnitude less financial harm?
Value comes from scarcity + demand. Open source software is by definition not scarce. Thus if a cryptocurrency has value, it's not it's code that its the value, it's the network effect of users using it that prevents other copies from outcompeting them at lower fees. Thus for any cryptocurrency token to have lasting value, it must derive that value from something external to it's bad ass code.
Take a look at how many things you can buy with BTC that you can't with ETH, that is the value, that is hard to replicate, hard to penetrate. Even lower volatility due to giant order books is a plus. Thus, when I see open source projects try to make money on the quality of their code, they're missing out on where the value comes from.
Now, could ETH be amazing, sure. Would it be amazing if the tokens were worth $1 or 10 cents, or 1 cent? Probably, the same way tcp packets are amazing, and worth pretty damn little.
SO when people hop on the pump, on a currency that is only hitting 1 metric, the pump one, it's dangerous and risky.
Then there's the risk that your'e enticing dev's to write smart contracts, when smart contracts are hard to write. And you're giving them all the tools they need to hang themselves.
Then there's the risk that you say lots of things that are inaccurate, which I guess I'll just tackle in a giant post next, lol.
I don't mind Bitcoin. But it's 10 years old. I was warning them in November 2013 about getting their political act together and innovating. https://youtu.be/P-7JIQKbm5U is me keynoting in London on just this topic.
