I get your concern about the current-state. The "dev/money" ratio needs adjustment. Market cap/ICO/yet-another-cryptocurrency is not what excites me.
I am working on a simple premise: The DAO (perpetually running, globally accessible, democratic kickstarter) would have been a good project to see succeed. It failed not because it was a bad idea, but because we rushed into it without tools like this one. Augur, Aragon, 0x, Golem, Filecoin are other projects that might be worthwhile. Also ZCash (doesn't have smart contracts yet, but you should really look into the work Ariel Gabizon and company are doing.)
You wouldn't want to write an linux kernel code without a compiler, would you? You shouldn't write immutable code without formal verifiers. Agree?
Did you assume the conclusion, that it is worthwhile? Is it possible that your hypothesis is wrong, and it isn’t worthwhile to continue building open-source crypto projects?
Yes, I completely agree. There's plenty of tech available to achieve many of the goals of functionality, affordability, and privacy a motivated team of developers could have. Just that it's often unnecessarily difficult to build and use. Probably things will be much better in a(nother) decade, but the whole thing is still a work in progress. In the meantime, why pay the cost 100% of the time for avoiding a bad thing that happens 1% of the time? Cryptocurrency has its utility, but much less when minimizing trust isn't a requirement.
I’m a pretty experienced solidly / ethereum developer, and a developer with 13 years experience in vast array of systems and languages (from embedded C on ppc to high performance c++ and now deep learning and scientific computing in python). I completely agree with you, that there’s some very odd language choices in solidity, seemingly rookie mistakes, and the tooling is very poor. But! It’s the 1.0 of crypto. Early C stuff was poor, early html development was poor, early OpenGL development was poor, it’s just new.
I see it as a lot of room for opportunity, but I could also see how it could be frustrating to some more senior people - but I have found part of growing old and seeing things constantly get re-invented but slightly different are windows of opportunity - so I get excited
It doesn't really solve the problem satisfactorily.
Somebody still has to develop the software. The end result is a single download, produced by some form of authority. And typically there's one project, with one group controlling it.
And miners are more or less the same everywhere, they want to make a profit.
You can get somewhat better. You can find a dev group that aligns with your interests. Maybe you can even find a cryptocurrency where there are multiple independent implementations led by multiple groups with none being the clear winner.
But that's an unstable situation. The dynamics of a dev team can shift as people come and go. Balance is easily broken, if a project loses steam, or one becomes the default and gains overwhelming popularity, and you're back to having a single group in effective control.
You can migrate from one system to another, but any conversion has costs to it, both in terms of money and knowledge, attention and time resources.
This libertarian utopia seems very much like some sort of bureaucratic hell to me. To exist in such a society without getting royally screwed you have to invest immense amounts of your time to pay attention to everything and correctly and prompty react to it. You go on vacation for a couple weeks, and oops, suddenly the dev team is changing the rules from under you.
That's not really how the whole scene works. There's little upfront demand for such rigour, because the potential userbase for any given coin largely don't know to demand it. Instead, poor implementations fail and either get discarded or patched, and eventually, hopefully, whatever remains will be solid.
What I'm trying to say here is, the whole cryptocurrency field is much, much messier than you seem to expect.
To me this is like complaining about webvan in the 90s and missing the forest through the trees.
DAOs, and AMMs are interesting - there's a lot of potential in leveraging DeFi to make systems that can work in ways better than existing legacy tech, it's just hard and people don't have it already figured out to the point where looking at it makes it obvious. General public state is a new thing and how it can be used is being figured out (oracles, programmable money, etc.).
When something is new it looks more 'pointless' and toy-like. It takes a while for its value to become truly obvious to everyone (and it requires some people to see that value early).
It's true, work on other systems like proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work are in active development. It might be too hard to backport to bitcoin specifically, but other cryptocurrencies don't have to be this bad in the future.
I don't work in cryptocurrency and so maybe my perspective is flawed, but I am continually astounded by prevalence of low-hanging fruit in what ought to be an incredibly simple execution space.
As an outsider looking in, it feels like the cryptocurrency community has been given an ideal environment for static analysis and formal verification and still manages to produce grossly vulnerable and/or unreliable contracts.
Granted, but every new technology goes through this and the tools and best practices are improving. The code is open source too. I don't know why people, technologists especially, aren't recognizing this.
It's also worth examining the current system. How happy are you with your bank's 0.01% interest rate? Which is actually negative when you factor in inflation that's eroding the value of our dollars faster than ever, and increasingly transferring wealth to the top 1%? How happy are you about bank CEO compensation and bailouts? No one in crypto is asking for a bailout, even when it crashes 80%. And what about the fact that bank's charge poor people the most or flat out deny service? Or the fact that it's all closed source and behind closed doors.
There are actually more problems, but I didn't want to go off topic. Like about how the developers get paid a certain percentage. Someone made the calculations to be about $3m a year for all the developers combined each year. I know that they deserve to get compensated, but that goes completely off what cryptocurrencies stand for.
Like the whole thing seems to be riding on the concept of zk-SNARKS, but the fact of the matter is, there is already Monero which offers the privacy aspect that zcoin advertises (but fails to deliver on that too)
Indeed. But the learning curve for the current set of crypto wallets and tools is too high to allow any widespread adoption.
These cannot be products for devs only or they will never take off. If you want a $1B product to pursue, someone should built decent tooling for crypto.
This seems to be the case with a lot of cryptocurrencies. They spread themselves too thin before they've even begun solving the core problems they need to solve. It would be enough to get a DAG-based distributed ledger/coin running and running well, but throw in all the extra nonsense and it's just a mess of poor prioritization.
I wholeheartedly agree that the problems Tea mentions do need to be solved, I maintain several large-ish OSS projects; it's not easy, takes a lot of effort.
Unfortunely, anything with crypto kinda just flops. Crypto was a decent idea, but there were too many uneducated people who didn't know what it was, and now it's turned into this dumpster fire.
I think another problem is also how no crypto project actually explains how it helps. Sure, I'm all in if I can earn some money for maintaing my OSS, but how does that work? What are the details? Literally every crypto thing just does some hand-waving and says, "don't worry 'bout it, it'll just work magically, trust me".
The optimistic view of this is that you can run a node in a distributed payment and compute platform for a few thousands bucks. Consider the alternatives: the infrastructure running PayPal, the massive and archaic automated clearing house systems used by megabanks, whatever it is Western Union does to move money. You can participate in a distributed, open source alternative for what amounts to an affordable price for those in developed countries.
I am not claiming you should do this! What I'm attempting to illustrate is that this momentum towards freer and more open systems is what drives the technical optimism in cryptocurrencies and blockchains. There seems to be a Moore's law effect dropping the price of what is currently gatekept by governments and megacorporations. Hard work is once again creating exciting innovations that at least have the potential to improve the world.
it's pretty clear why competent, responsible developers are not participating in this space -- we're too frightened by possible government sanctions
Where's 'rayiner? He'll love this.
Writing bitcoin software is like writing crypto. You need to get it exactly right.
But instead of starting with a spec written down that the crypto community tears to pieces, instead the developers eat their own dogfood. No, change that: they build critical infrastructure out of their own dogfood. All before it's ever been vetted by the really smart people.
I'd say competent people don't write Bitcoin marketplaces that handle real money for the same reason competent people don't write their own home-grown crypto and then make it a single-point-of-failure for their entire business.
There are some Zcash forks with iffy dev support and no market traction. The problem is the kind of cryptography you need to do something like Zcash is very very very hard to get right. Zcash actually got the tech right and handled the issues they hit well. They just didn't do a good job with reputation outside of tech.
No one else as done the same tech yet themselves. A few things have launched and allegedly plan to add a privacy layer (Mina, Celo). But actually building that kind of tech is a lot harder than reputation management or standard blockchains.
I don't view the dev's change in narrative from p2p cash to store of value as a positive development. Neither is their fetish with decentralization. Frankly I think their refusal to hard fork an increased block size opened the playing field to several other contenders. I think the bottom line is that we need practical approaches and solutions not some over designed perfect solution that is 3 years away.
Remember that the GP was about Bitcoin, not crypto as a concept. Most of the 'being worked ons' there don't apply, and in many cases, the community is hostile to things that may solve the problems (e.g. the debate/debacle around the block size limit) for selfish reasons.
Ether's ecosystem is a lot more promising, but still has a ton of rockiness. More specifically, I'm not confident in the core usability problems being UX implementation details. People don't want to have to think this much when making mundane purchases.
Also, I'd argue just being as good as the existing systems is mere table stakes. It needs to be better (outside of being a speculation vehicle). That is one I truly don't see happening. The anonymity/uncensorability benefits are questionable, the valuation problem appears to rely exclusively on fickle market whims or corrupt centralized entities, lack of refundability is an anti-feature for the mass market (and only solvable with centralized middlemen, which obviates half the reason to be using a crypto in the first place!)
The problem here is really Ethereum and the language Solidity. Chuck full of gotchas and completely horrible to work with.
The mechanics of stable coins is really trivial and thusly should be trivial to implement and validate. Unfortunately it is not, and it is sad that the hype and investment rush inside the broader crypto field does not foster languages and platforms that actually are suitable for the few realworld use cases that exists inside crypto.
I am working on a simple premise: The DAO (perpetually running, globally accessible, democratic kickstarter) would have been a good project to see succeed. It failed not because it was a bad idea, but because we rushed into it without tools like this one. Augur, Aragon, 0x, Golem, Filecoin are other projects that might be worthwhile. Also ZCash (doesn't have smart contracts yet, but you should really look into the work Ariel Gabizon and company are doing.)
You wouldn't want to write an linux kernel code without a compiler, would you? You shouldn't write immutable code without formal verifiers. Agree?
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