The astonishing amount of time, money and effort that has been put into cryptocurrencies is a sociological marvel. Every emotion, every cognitive bias, every aspect of the human experience is on display. And it's all fully documented, in real time. Mass delusion in Big Data. A thousand sociology PhDs could be written about reddit's /r/cryptocurrency alone. A joyous, despairing, dissonant, gloating, brooding, witty, witless, confusing, euphoric mass.
This article is part of a curious subgenre of cryptocurrency literature, that of an advocate of one cryptocurrency (Ethereum) holding forth against a different cryptocurrency (EOS). Do the words have any meaning beyond the confines of the beautifully elaborate internal world in which they reside? Perhaps, in a strictly metaphysical sense. I can't appreciate it, or even comprehend it, but I can sit back an delight that such a thing exists at all.
Ethereum is unquestionably an interesting technology. Whether the price is justified is a matter for the markets, which currently place several billions of dollars of value on it. If you are so certain it is mispriced, there are numerous places for you to profit from such stupidity, if you are confident enough to put your money up.
Vitalik is the benevolent dictator for life of Ethereum, and EOS is a radically different model than proof of work blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin. However Vitalik and the ETH community recognizes there is some value in proof of stake and is working on their own implementation which is different than EOS’ model.
Cryptocurrencies make us question why money has value, what makes an asset, and all sorts of interesting philosophical and economic questions. I wouldn’t write off the entire industry and technology. It has been attacked by intelligent people for a decade and it keeps moving forwards.
It is not the last time we are going to see this sort of thing on the Internet, because, contrary to the overhyped media coverage, "blockchain" is not the revolution; the Internet is the revolution, and things like blockchains, P2P filesharing, the Web, and so forth are just the applications society is experimenting with for a previously inconceivable technology. We are a long way from a steady state and I expect to see this pattern of behavior several more times in my lifetime (by historical standards, we as a society are just starting to understand this technology, and it will be another century or two before society has internalized the Internet).
Don’t modern mining pools work exactly like coin voting? The entry level is buying hardware instead of digital tokens, but it’s not like proof of work is a democratic process anymore either where every small timer has as much to say anymore.
It’s also a little weird to read about economics from cryptcurrencies that you still can’t use to buy beer.
It's better to think of the node runners as the "coin voters" for anything democratic. Look at the Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash split for instance.
Participants of modern mining pools for all coins are arguably just in it for the money (and likely have subsidized or below average electricity rates).
Proof of work isn't a democratic process at all. The "math problem" that the miners are solving is providing a hash of the next published block of transactions (plus some other things). The protocol doesn't check every miner's solution and democratically choose the correct set of transactions to publish based on consensus. Instead, it's a lottery - it's just that it isn't economically cost effective to "buy lottery tickets" that attempt to publish an essentially alternate "history" to the blockchain.
There are multiple ways to buy beer using cryptocurrency - physical debit cards that draw from a deposited cryptocurrency balance at time of purchase using the current exchange rate, for instance. Kind of like how it works when you use your EU debit card to pay for a beer in the US using euros.
[+] [-] adwhit|7 years ago|reply
This article is part of a curious subgenre of cryptocurrency literature, that of an advocate of one cryptocurrency (Ethereum) holding forth against a different cryptocurrency (EOS). Do the words have any meaning beyond the confines of the beautifully elaborate internal world in which they reside? Perhaps, in a strictly metaphysical sense. I can't appreciate it, or even comprehend it, but I can sit back an delight that such a thing exists at all.
[+] [-] seibelj|7 years ago|reply
Vitalik is the benevolent dictator for life of Ethereum, and EOS is a radically different model than proof of work blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin. However Vitalik and the ETH community recognizes there is some value in proof of stake and is working on their own implementation which is different than EOS’ model.
Cryptocurrencies make us question why money has value, what makes an asset, and all sorts of interesting philosophical and economic questions. I wouldn’t write off the entire industry and technology. It has been attacked by intelligent people for a decade and it keeps moving forwards.
[+] [-] betterunix2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidstling|7 years ago|reply
It’s also a little weird to read about economics from cryptcurrencies that you still can’t use to buy beer.
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|7 years ago|reply
Participants of modern mining pools for all coins are arguably just in it for the money (and likely have subsidized or below average electricity rates).
Proof of work isn't a democratic process at all. The "math problem" that the miners are solving is providing a hash of the next published block of transactions (plus some other things). The protocol doesn't check every miner's solution and democratically choose the correct set of transactions to publish based on consensus. Instead, it's a lottery - it's just that it isn't economically cost effective to "buy lottery tickets" that attempt to publish an essentially alternate "history" to the blockchain.
There are multiple ways to buy beer using cryptocurrency - physical debit cards that draw from a deposited cryptocurrency balance at time of purchase using the current exchange rate, for instance. Kind of like how it works when you use your EU debit card to pay for a beer in the US using euros.