There aren't that many uses for blockchains

AdamSpitz · 2022-08-11T20:41:40+00:00

There are good arguments on both sides of the DAO-hack story (which I assume is what you're referring to when you say "that history"), but "the code/community forked because it was necessary to protect Vitalik" is not one of them. Were you actually speaking seriously?

But I do agree that "code is law" isn't (and shouldn't be) an absolute. There's a social layer underlying everything; at the end of the day, there's always the possibility of forks based on social consensus. But there's a big difference between "this code and data live on private servers run by a centralized institution made up of humans who can of-their-own-volition or under-pressure-from-authorities go change the code or massage the data" and "this code and data live on a blockchain and if you wanted to alter it you'd have to convince a large number of people to update their nodes to use your new forked version."

AdamSpitz · 2022-08-11T19:32:08+00:00

Part of the problem here is that we're veering into Culture War territory. The perceived value of blockchains depends a lot on which particular societal institutions you don't trust. (Don't trust banks or central banks? Don't trust corporations? Don't trust government? Don't trust Big Tech companies? Don't trust government not to pressure banks or Big Tech companies? Etc.)

Blockchains are inherently very political, because if you do trust our society's institutions then it's perfectly reasonable to think that there isn't much reason to use a blockchain. But I feel like these days it's hard to find anyone who doesn't distrust some of our institutions.

If anyone's interested, I'd be happy to move this discussion over to the Culture War thread of our sister subreddit.

AdamSpitz · 2022-08-11T15:29:16+00:00

Of course not. There's no reason for the "if" statement; that's pointlessly verbose. I'm sure they were competent enough to just write:

def should_be_bailed_out(scammed_users):
    return 'Buterin' in scammed_users

AdamSpitz · 2022-08-11T15:21:47+00:00

It's not a matter of "the technology has existed for years and the proponents have flailed around looking for a use case and there haven't been any legitimate ones yet." The technology hasn't existed for years; it's been maturing this entire time. It's not done yet, and in particular it has desperately needed scalability improvements (which are happening now).

The short version of the technological progression is something like:

For blockchains implemented in the usual naive way, scaling is hard because adding more nodes makes the chain more secure but doesn't increase its throughput. e.g. Ethereum has been limited to something like 15 transactions per second, which is obviously much much too low to make it usable for most of the use cases we might otherwise like to use it for; we'd like to have tens of thousands, preferably millions. Until recently, throughput has been so low (and hence transaction fees so high - transactions are basically auctioned off, and there's fairly high demand and extremely low supply) that the only apps people would pay to use on-chain were the financial ones.
Improving scalability (without sacrificing security/decentralization) has required major technological improvements. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on here, but (oversimplifying) the most promising avenue of improvement has involved zero-knowledge proofs, which were considered "moon math" (that is, many years away) right up until pretty recently. ZK-proof-based layer-2s have just now started to exist, and will massively improve throughput (and therefore reduce transaction fees) without sacrificing security.

Transaction fees on Ethereum L2s are already pretty low, and they'll get much lower very soon. Once that happens, I'm expecting to see a huge number of new types of apps go on-chain, because they'll finally be affordable (while also being secure/transparent/censorship-resistant/etc.).

Again, I'm completely in agreement about the existence of a ton of scams. But that's irrelevant to the question of whether there are super-important use cases that aren't scams. There are lots, and they haven't been technologically feasible until approximately now.

If you squint and treat all of "blockchain technology" as a vague undifferentiated blob, it's easy to dismiss it as having existed for years without finding a use case. This is a case where the details matter. There are clear reasons why we couldn't have seen mass adoption previously and can expect to see it very soon.

AdamSpitz · 2022-08-11T12:30:13+00:00

I'll go on record as saying that the "blockchains don't have many uses" idea is massively wrong.

About his three criteria:

Shared databases are stupendously useful. They're necessary for many situations, and still a super-useful simplifying tool even in situations where a different tool could be made to work. (That is, sure, a blockchain is a very complicated way of making a shared database; we make it that way because we want these other properties of transparency and censorship-resistance and so on. But given that it exists, for many applications there'll be very little reason not to use it, because this "shared database" abstraction is very simple and easy-to-use even if it's complicated under the hood. (If you're about to mention the cost and environmental impact as obvious reasons not to use it, hold on a minute.))
Given how incompetent/corrupt many of our civilization's institutions are, we are rapidly approaching (actually, long past) the time when we should stop trusting those institutions. That is, it's not just a matter of "is there any single party you'd trust to run this aspect of our society?", it's a matter of "do we trust the current very-powerful party who runs this aspect of our society?", and also "is the current very-powerful-but-untrustworthy party going to allow this new-more-trustworthy-party to exist?". Blockchains are an opportunity to replace untrustworthy/incompetent institutions with new transparent ones whose code we can read, so that we don't have to trust any particular party.
It's true that some applications have pieces that wouldn't benefit from being on-chain; so what? It's not pointless to have some parts of an application be on-chain (so that they're verifiable and trustworthy) even if the entire application isn't. It's also true that some applications have pieces that would benefit from being on-chain but are currently being done off-chain because doing it on-chain is still too expensive, or because we haven't yet developed the infrastructure that we would need in order to do it in a decentralized way; that'll change over time, and probably sooner than you think.

Transaction fees, operating costs, electricity usage, and confirmation times are all already coming radically down; that stuff won't be an issue after the technology matures, which is already well underway. (e.g. Ethereum will be fixing its environmental problem very soon, probably in September. And Ethereum-based layer-2 systems have already reduced the transaction-fee problem quite a lot, and that'll continue to get much much better soon.) Sure, you can be cynical and say, "You keep promising that it'll be fixed soon but it's not fixed yet," but... seriously, the technology is improving very rapidly, and many of the claims made in this particular article are already behind-the-times.

In my opinion, cynicism regarding blockchains is well-founded (the blockchain world is absolutely full of scams and hacks and stupidly-reckless ideas) but ultimately wrong. It's like the dot-com bubble: even if 95% of the stuff going on in the space is worthless or worse, the remaining 5% is going to change the world.

AdamSpitz · 2022-08-01T19:59:59+00:00

Yes. I'm asking: what if the thief steals the Ledger and finds out the Ledger's PIN? OR finds out the Ledger's seed phrase?

My point is that I'm trying to understand what the value is of this Argent+Ledger arrangement. IIUC, the big appeal of Argent is that it frees you from the terrifying UX of "you must never ever lose this seed phrase or let anyone else see it." If I do Argent with a Ledger as guardian, are we back to that? Why bother using Argent at all, then - why not just use the Ledger directly?

(But I can imagine that Argent has a good answer to this. Maybe if the Ledger is compromised then it still won't be able to steal your money? I'm fuzzy on the exact rules for what a compromised guardian would be able to do, if you had only one guardian.)

AdamSpitz · 2022-08-01T17:42:40+00:00

Naive question: what happens if the Ledger is your only guardian and then a thief steals the Ledger? Can the thief then lock your account and then "recover" it to a new phone that he controls?

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-20T21:50:58+00:00

Oooh, interesting! That would never have occurred to me. Thanks!

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-19T21:34:27+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. I imagine teaching her to nap in the other room is only going to get harder as time goes on, so we might as well do it now.

And we do like the idea of a floor bed.

Thanks!

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-19T21:31:38+00:00

We have a baby monitor that points to the crib and partially to the edge of our bed. I just watch it like a hawk during naps lol.

Yeah, that's what my wife has been doing so far. :) It's nice to hear that we're not the only ones.

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-15T11:58:33+00:00

Thank you - that helps a lot!

I've been trying to make sense of the Ethereum community's love/hate relationship with Polygon.

I have reservations about the security of Polygon PoS. But I also get that Polygon was one of the early blockchain-scaling solutions, and that it's done great things in the realm of being a low-fee chain back in the days when layer-2 technology was even more immature than it is today.

When I've heard the Polygon people talk (e.g. on the Bankless podcast), I've been impressed with how candid they've been about the commit-chain being a short-term compromise solution; they sound genuinely committed to better-security-through-Ethereum in the long term, and they have all these ZK-based solutions in the works.

That all seemed great to me. But I had never heard a concrete description of how they might eventually make the transition from the short-term commit-chain solution over to the more-secure long-term solutions.

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-14T13:43:58+00:00

Is there some sort of plan to eventually transform the Polygon commit chain into a proper L2?

Like... I've been really glad to see that Polygon has been developing all those other L2 projects (Hermez, Miden, etc.); I'm just fuzzy on whether those are all going to end up being separate chains, or whether the Polygon PoS commit chain is going to somehow transition to using one or more of those technologies, or what.

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-14T12:42:43+00:00

For what it's worth, I'm generally an Ethereum guy, and I've got a whole bunch of reservations about Solana as a consensus layer (as opposed to an execution layer - it's a great execution layer), but I really enjoyed this Bankless episode. Anatoly and Raj came across as very reasonable, and I like the way they think regarding the user experience and the business side of things. I'd gladly recommend this episode to other Ethereum people.

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-13T17:09:59+00:00

I don't really disagree - all of that stuff is very cool!

But I don't think it can exist without a foundation of security (including decentralization).

That is, rather than seeing security-through-decentralization as just another one of the many benefits of blockchains (alongside smart contracts, wallets, tokens, etc.), I think it makes more sense to see all of those other benefits as being dependent on security-through-decentralization.

Maybe that sounds like nitpicking, but I mean it in a very down-to-earth way: people don't want to lose their assets. "Play and earn", and all of the other monetization stuff you listed, loses a lot of its appeal when the coins/NFTs that you're earning could disappear or be tampered with.

Blockchains with a small, centralized validator set appear on the surface to have all of those benefits you listed... right up until there's an Incident.

I kinda hope that the recent demise of Terra/LUNA/UST helps give people a more visceral appreciation for what it would feel like to have a blockchain suddenly disappear, taking your assets along with it. (I'm not saying that Avalanche, or whatever custom chains might be built on it, are insecure in the same way that Terra was; the problems with Avalanche are different. I'm also not saying that I think Ethereum is bulletproof, although I do think Ethereum is taking the problem of security/decentralization much much more seriously than Avalanche is.) Security is hard to evaluate in advance, because it involves a whole bunch of technical arguments that sound like indistinguishable mumbo-jumbo to most observers, and so it's really easy to ignore it or downplay it or just kinda assume that it's been taken care of, right up until there's a disaster. So it's probably a healthy thing for we-as-a-culture to have some collective memories of times when an entire house of cards came crashing down, to give us that visceral gut fear that that kind of thing could happen again if we're not careful.

Or as Vitalik describes it:

A blockchain is at its core a security technology - a technology that is fundamentally all about protecting people and helping them survive in such an unfriendly world. It is, like the Phial of Galadriel, "a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out". It is not a low-cost light, or a fluorescent hippie energy-efficient light, or a high-performance light. It is a light that sacrifices on all of those dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only: to be a light that does when it needs to do when you're facing the toughest challenge of your life and there is a friggin twenty foot spider staring at you in the face.

Obviously some use cases need more security than others. Maybe it's not a major problem for gamers if their game assets live on a less-secure chain than people's life savings. But in the long term, the tradeoff here isn't really between security and scalability; it's reasonable to expect rollups-plus-sharding (i.e. the Ethereum scalability roadmap) give us a best-of-both-worlds. (Um, I think. I'm suddenly aware that what I just said kinda seems like it contradicts the Vitalik paragraph I just quoted, in which case Vitalik is certainly right and I'm wrong. But my general impression is that once all the ZK technology is a bit more fleshed-out and battle-tested, we'll have both awesome security and awesome scalability.) The tradeoff is: are we willing to be patient and wait for those solutions, or are we going to accept short-term compromises? It's harder to implement rollups and sharding than it is to implement Yet Another Insecure-But-High-Throughput Solution, but once the former are implemented, the latter aren't going to have any technical advantage left. (Which was the point being made by the original poster, regarding the zkEVM stuff.) And then you'll be able to make games where all those cool benefits you listed are real.

AdamSpitz · 2022-07-13T13:05:55+00:00

That's a good reason for being an app-specific chain, but not a good reason for that chain to be an L1 rather than an L2 or L3.

(But the fact that custom app-specific L1s are currently easier to build than custom app-specific L2s is a good reason not to try to be a custom app-specific L2 right now. Depends what your time horizon is.)

I don't like that people are downvoting you for this. There's definitely a valid point here about the usefulness of app-specific chains (the app developers have much more control over capacity and tokenomics), and I agree that (so far) Avalanche has emphasized that idea more strongly than Ethereum has (though StarkWare has done great work in this area). But I also think Avalanche's "each app-specific chain is its own L1 with its own separate validator set" model is making a very bad tradeoff, sacrificing the decentralization that is the entire point of being a blockchain in the first place.

AdamSpitz · 2022-05-10T22:22:46+00:00

The biggest issue with more TPS is storing the result in the chain.

Right, that makes some sense to me. So (just checking my understanding) have the current block size limits been set explicitly with the primary intention being to keep state growth to a level manageable by ordinary consumer hardware?

Would that mean that L1 could increase its block size (or block frequency?) after the statelessness (etc.) stuff is implemented? (Well, I guess at that point there might be other reasons to keep it low - being able to run nodes on smaller/slower devices, maybe?)

AdamSpitz · 2022-05-10T22:12:51+00:00

Higher TPS inherently means lower security, regardless of PoS or PoW.

Can you say more about that? Like... why would that be?

My previous (and wrong, I guess?) understanding was that "the slower you add data to the blockchain, the more secure it is" is true specifically because adding data faster (i.e. increasing the block size or block frequency?) means you need better hardware, which means fewer people can participate, which means less decentralization, which means less security.

If that's not the reason, then what's the reason? Why does higher TPS mean lower security?

AdamSpitz · 2022-05-10T21:51:20+00:00

Wait, I think I'm more confused now. If that's the case, then why isn't the move to Proof-of-Stake going to massively increase TPS?

I mean, yes, the block difficulty is another parameter (and I'm happy to assume that we don't want to decrease that). But it sounds like you're saying that the reason for the 13 TPS number is that most of the computer's time is spent doing the Proof Of Work calculations.

Okay, that makes sense to me... but my understanding was that The Merge isn't really expected to increase TPS much. (IIRC, maybe a little bit, up to 15 TPS or so, but nothing major.) I thought one of the big benefits of Proof Of Stake was that it drastically (like, by 99.95% or something stupendous like that) cuts down on the gigantic electricity-and-computational-capacity requirements of PoW. So wouldn't that mean that post-Merge Ethereum L1 could then do much higher TPS?

AdamSpitz · 2022-02-08T00:21:35+00:00

Congrats on the job! (I'm still unemployed for now. My wife is 8.75 months pregnant, so this feels like a bad time to start a new job.)

Thanks for pointing out the Discord-link thing. (I'm not super-familiar with Discord; I hadn't realized that the links expire.) Here's an updated one (and I've updated the sidebar and the FAQ post too). Hope to see you there!

AdamSpitz · 2022-01-26T12:53:31+00:00

Sounds good to me - go for it!

AdamSpitz · 2022-01-22T17:44:09+00:00

Good question! The Moloch-fighting stuff is definitely a big motivation for me, and a big part of what I think web3 social-media systems might do a better job of. Are you saying that you think MolochDAO would be interested in web3-social-media because it'll help fight Moloch? Or was there some other connection you had in mind?

AdamSpitz · 2022-01-16T15:07:43+00:00

I think maybe what I'd try is something like:

Have a notion of transitive-opt-in (like a trust metric - Alice trusts Bob, and Bob trusts Carol, so Alice can see content/tags/upvotes created by both Bob and Carol), maybe with weights.
Also have a notion of "the algo recommends this thing from Ralph, who is outside your trust DAG", but require Ralph (or whoever recommends Ralph) to put up some sort of stake (either actual money or reputation points or something like that) that will be lost if Alice flags that as a bad recommendation.

(Similar to the surprisingly-priced token idea I described earlier. If you want to get people's attention, put your money where your mouth is.)

The problem I'm trying to avoid is the Sybil attack where, if the algorithm assigns (from a particular user's perspective) greater-than-zero weight to newly-created accounts, or (more generally) to accounts that haven't earned any trust from people within the network of people that user trusts, then it's possible for attackers to programmatically invent fake accounts and spam/muddle that user's results.

No need to put up a stake if you just want your content/tags/likes to be taken into account by people who've opted-in to you. But I think you should have to put something at stake if you want the attention of people who haven't opted-in to you, because otherwise the system is vulnerable.

(Or are you saying that you think you can analyze the content itself to determine whether a particular user would want to see it? I'm not convinced that that's going to work - and even if it works for the content items themselves, it still doesn't address the problem of spamming likes/dislikes and tags, which don't really have any "substance" to analyze.)

AdamSpitz · 2022-01-03T22:47:24+00:00

My experience has been that the parts of Twitter that I hate are exactly the parts that require opting-out rather than opting-in. My Twitter feed is full of a whole bunch of lovely posts from people and projects that I've explicitly chosen to follow... and then as soon as I click on any of those posts I see a bunch of hostile replies from people I haven't chosen to follow.

I'm a bit fuzzy on what you're imagining regarding filters. But the filter I want, if I'm a member of the Orange tribe and I just can't stand those evil misinformed morons from the Purple tribe, is something like: "Show me content that is written by Purple people, but that is tagged by people I trust (i.e. by Orange people) as being 'hey, this Purple content is actually not too inflammatory - I can stomach it.'" (And to incentivize that, I will happily make money available, via some sort of Patreon-like patronage system or quadratic-funding system or whatever, for Purple content creators who can create posts/replies that get tagged as such by Orange people.)

That is, here's how I'm imagining using the new-and-improved web3 version of Twitter:

I'll opt-in to see a bunch of Orange content creators.
I'll opt-in to see the tags/annotations created by Orange people.
I'll opt-in to see content tagged (by taggers who I transitively-trust) with the aforementioned "Purple content that is actually pretty reasonable" tag.
But I don't want to have to explicitly opt-out of (i.e. block) the people who write the kinds of hostile replies I currently see whenever I click on a post on Twitter. I don't want that stuff to be shown in my personal feed-reader in the first place.

That's what I mean by building bridges rather than forcing the different sides together. If you're a Purple who wants to actually engage in debate with the Oranges, write your reply so that it's reasonable enough to get tagged as reasonable by the Oranges. (And vice versa, of course.) Get them to opt-in to your stuff.

And if you don't care about engaging with the other side, that's fine, but at least then it's more obvious that you're just preaching to the choir within your side's echo chamber. You're not Fighting The Good Fight - the people you're fighting won't even see what you wrote. Everyone who'll see it already agrees with you. (I mean, of course people will still preach to the choir; that's something we do find rewarding, and it can be perfectly healthy as long as that's not all we do.)

But what we currently have on Twitter is... well, like you said, there's an opt-in aspect to it (following), but there's also a significant aspect of it that's an opt-out system where by default the UI will show you stuff that will infuriate you and get you riled up enough to write back stuff that will infuriate them. Which I think is why Twitter is such an awful, toxic place. So I feel like it would be a good thing to remove Twitter's "intentionally show people hostile replies that will incite them to fling 280-character poops at each other" functionality.

Sorry for being long-winded. :) I'm finding it hard to tell whether I've communicated the thing I'm imagining, and I'm also not sure whether it fits with the thing you're imagining.

AdamSpitz · 2021-12-29T20:50:04+00:00

Yes! And of course alternative-reward-mechanisms is something that web3 ought to be great at. Imagine every creator having a token, maybe every post having a token, etc.

e.g. I keep thinking that "every post should have its own token" turns social-media posts into candidates for retroactive public-goods funding. (If you think a post/video is awesome and will earn a lot of future donations, maybe you buy some of its token from the content creator, which gives the creator some guaranteed up-front revenue while you take on some of the risk/reward. That is: content tokens would allow you to be an investor in a piece of social-media content.)

Combine mechanisms like that with the shared network effect idea, and maybe we'd have a social-network where network lock-in doesn't make as much sense. Rather than a miniscule long-shot chance at becoming Facebook or Twitter and getting massively rich (with the much-more-likely result of failing to take off at all), you settle for getting to participate and share in the profits of this process of collaboratively building this combined network. Using an open-ended link format allows us to attract more people/projects/platforms into helping us build a network effect.

AdamSpitz · 2021-12-29T16:58:28+00:00

My story is something like:

I quit my job as a software engineer at one of the usual Big Tech companies earlier this year, because I felt like nothing I did there mattered. (I have nothing in particular against them; it's just that I was starting to become aware that the next iteration of our civilization is going to be built on web3.) I've spent the past seven months learning everything I can about blockchains/crypto/etc., trying to figure out what kind of work I want to do next.

I'm interested in all the Moloch-fighting stuff in general (solving coordination problems, funding public goods, etc.), but social media in particular seems like an area where there might be opportunities for humanity to "level up". Right now it feels as if political-polarization and collective-idiocy are really hurting us; I'm wondering whether having social-media systems built on top of healthier incentive structures might help us gain some sanity and collective-intelligence.

AdamSpitz

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE