The Ethereum Paradox

[TPTB_need_war]

[...]

Sorry to Charles, but I have explained in technical detail in the Ethereum Paradox thread why I think Ethereum is a grandiose technobabble deception/clusterfuck. The Casper consensus algorithm insolubly flawed conceptual crap isn't validated. Vitalik entirely ignores my technical criticism, even I had put it in front of his face a few times already. What peer review. I am not too thrilled about them throwing $18 million down a rat hole then coming back for more by pumping some technobabble that can't work decentralized without destroying Nash equilibrium.

[TPTB_need_war]

Main dev is russian like vitalik buterin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMC6u4jMTsc

Thanks for posting the YouTube link man, much appreciated! There seems to be a lot of FUD going around so everything that helps clarify is great!

Sasha Ivanov claims that Ethereum's scaling problem will be solved, yet we have explained in the Ethereum Paradox thread that it can't be solved and remain decentralized.

Either he failed to omit the detail that the only solution is centralization, he is disingenuous, or he isn't that well tuned in to the technology. Which is it? Is he a programmer? A great programmer? What is his history as a programmer? What is his age?

[tromp]

Sasha Ivanov claims that Ethereum's scaling problem will be solved

1 Bullion + market cap!

[Washika]

Sasha Ivanov claims that Ethereum's scaling problem will be solved

1 Bullion + market cap!

That could be good news for the price of Ethereum. Is that the reason that the Ethereum price rises recently?

[TPTB_need_war]

Is that the reason that the Ethereum price rises recently?

No sorry I caused that:

On the non-logarithm scaled chart, Ethereum broke down through the February pump support, and the next support is from the January support line which currently extends to about 0.0164 BTC ≈ $7:

https://dc-charts.com/chart_eth.php?ex=16&cu=0&tz=6&ar=1

On the logarithm scaled chart, Ethereum broken down through all support lines and there is no support.

If it breaks below roughly $8.50, then next uptrend support line is at roughly $7. The next support would be at roughly $6. If below that, there is no support and it would collapse.

Slow rate of collapse might be short covering.

[TPTB_need_war]

enforcing worldwide spread is not easy, and perhaps not doable.
They tried doing it with porn in the 90's, file sharing in 2000's and so on...
and servers kept over heating and got fried up

As I explained the key distinction upthread, those are free markets because they are decentralized and there is no significant asymmetry of information which makes it otherwise.

It pisses me off when readers waste my expensive time by ignoring what I already wrote twice in this thread. This makes three times. Please readers don't make me teach this again by writing another post which ignores my prior points.

I still dont understand why your'e calling waves a scam only cuz it made an ico (like everyone now).
Its devs are legit, real names with real work behind them.
So they thought charles and kushti are friends which will support them, and were wrong, apologized and moved on.
everyone got their asses covered legaly ofc..
so if you think all ico's are scams, you got lots of work now not just on waves bro

Please clearify. tnx

1. I already provided the link to the thread two or three times in this thread, which explains that ICOs sold to non-accredited USA investors are ostensibly illegal.

I hate ICOs by now for other reasons:

2. They contribute to the mainstream thinking that crypto-currency is a scam and thus we will have great difficulty getting CC widely adopted if don't put a stop to these scams.

3. They extract capital to a few scammers, which could be better used to build our real ecosystems which are not vaporware and have real decentralized designs, such as Bitcoin and Monero.

4. They prey on the ignorance of n00b speculators, thus can never be a free market.

5. They can never attain adoption because they destroy the Nash equilibrium and decentralization of the ecosystem:

As an example: I can show that dash is an oligarchy, whether intentional or not, due to the way their paynode scheme works. These systems are designed to work trustlessly, so any hiccups (intentional or not) should be invalidated by the design, not left-up to the good or bad intentions of those who are engaged with it.

did the monero wrote that fact about infinite supply in their ann Huh   if i was an investard in monero i would feel cheated if it isnt

No one can fork Monero without the support of the decentralized miners. The distinction from the Dash masternode scam, is that a masternode is staked only once with DRK (Dash tokens) and earns 50+% ROI per annum forever after for the largest holders of Dash tokens, thus further centralizing the coin meaning there is a centralized oligarchy which the investors are relying on for their future expecation of profits which afaics fulfills the Howey test for what is an investment security that is regulated by the Securities Act. A decentralized PoW miner is constantly expending on electricity in a competitive free market. Owning a lot of Monero doesn't give you any leverage as a miner.

New post to better articulate why permissioned ledger, closed entopy systems likely have no value:

The problem with Emunie, as I talked about in the IOTA thread, is that any system that doesn't have permanent coin turnover via mining, removes mining completely, or puts some type of abstraction layer between mining and block reward (as in the case of IOTA), is a permissioned ledger.  People got too caught up in trying to improve on consensus mechanisms and forgot what actually constitutes a decentralized currency in the first place.

When Maxwell said he "proved mathematically that Bitcoin couldn't exist" and then it did exist, it was because he didn't take open entropy systems into account.  He already knew stuff like NXT or Emunie could exist, but nobody actually considered them to be decentralized.  They're distributed but not decentralized.  Basically stocks that come from a central authority and then the shareholders attempt to form a nash equilibrium to...siphon fees from other shareholders in a zero sum game because there is no nash equilibrium to be had by outsiders adopting a closed entropy system in the first place...

Take for example the real world use case of a nash equilbrium in finance.  There's many rival nations on earth and they're all competing in currency wars, manipulating, devaluing, etc.  They would all be better off with an undisputed unit of account that the other can't tamper with for trade.  In order to adopt said unit, it would have to be a permissionless system that each nation has access to where one of the group isn't suspected to have an enormous advantage over the others, otherwise they would all just say no.

This is why gold was utilized at all.  Yea, some territories had more than others, but nobody actually knew what was under the ground at the time.  Everyone just agreed it was scarce, valuable, and nobody really had a monopoly on it.  There are really no circumstances where people on an individual level or nation-state level can come together to form any kind of nash equilibrium in a closed entropy system.  The market is cornered by design, and for value to increase, others need to willingly submit to the equivalent of an extortion scheme.  The only time systems like that have value at all is when governments use coercion to force them onto people.

6. Because they are not decentralized and rely on expectation of profits based on the performance of a core group, ICOs turn what should be a competition for creating the best technology into a fist fucking fest of ad hominem and political games:

Let's psychoanalyze those want to troll me with a thread like this. Actually I have no censorship motivated objection about making a thread about me (I wish so much, it was possible to do something great without attaining any personal fame), it just feels really stupid because I (the idealist in me) think the technology is more important than the person, which is one of the main reasons I hate vaporware ICOs.

This thread serves mainly to deflect attention away from Dash's instamine scam.

+1 for conscious reason.

The subconscious reason this thread exists is the psychological phenomenon that it is better to destroy everyone, than to fail alone.

"I dropped my ice cream in the mud, so now I am throwing mud on your ice cream so we are the same, because God hates us equally".

This is what socialism built. Equality is prosperity, because fairness is the uniformity of nature's Gaussian distribution. Equality is a human right! Didn't you know that!

They would rather waste the time of important coders whose time would be better spent coding a solution for humanity, so as to satisfy their inability to accept their mistakes and jealousy.

7. ICOs have less liquidity because they are not widely distributed and due to #5:

you can read my observations here.

Interesting post.

The salient quote is of course:

Why litecoin? Liquidity. These guys own 5 and 6 digits amount of BTC. They need massive liquidity to increase their holdings by any significant degree. And as such litecoin has been a blessing. Will history repeat itself?

I've had that in my mind for a loooong time. Liquidity is absolutely necessary for the design, marketing, and distribution of crypto-currency, if you want to succeed.

[TPTB_need_war]

I suspect the underlying reason for shutting down their own forums, may have something to do with wanting to escape from allegations of being in control of the due diligence process for investors. I suspect they are starting to feel the dark clouds of the insoluble reality of the Ethereum Paradox thread and potential price manipulation allegations bearing down on them, and they may be starting to prepare for the potential lawsuits and possibly even regulatory actions if the entire project ends up a bust.

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

is Vitalik an order of magnitude smarter than Satoshi?

no, but his balls are an order of magnitude bigger

when you are thinking about dropping a million dollars of your hard earned cash into a crypto community, knowing that the lead developer has the huevos to show himself in public and stand behind his creation instead of hiding like a coward or criminal offers the potential investor a certain level of clarity that is devilishly absent from the bitcoin community.

And why do you ask, do investors love this "clarity" concept that the bitcoin community cannot seem to grasp?

Why does Wall St demand quarterly reports from every company CEO?

Well, in the words of the worlds richest coward, "if you don't understand by now, then ur obviously too stoopid"

You will not receive a dime of Wall Street money without a company CEO.

but for those admittedly too stupid who still ask why, here's the only answer:




















TRUST

Satoshi left because he knew he was in danger if he was a public persona, he had nothing to gain. It would damage Bitcoin as a project with "a CEO".

Also, the point of Bitcoin is that we don't need "Wall Street CEO's" permission to grow. If they don't want to get involved, others will, and at some point they will be forced to join or sink.

[generalizethis]

is Vitalik an order of magnitude smarter than Satoshi?

no, but his balls are an order of magnitude bigger

when you are thinking about dropping a million dollars of your hard earned cash into a crypto community, knowing that the lead developer has the huevos to show himself in public and stand behind his creation instead of hiding like a coward or criminal offers the potential investor a certain level of clarity that is devilishly absent from the bitcoin community.

And why do you ask, do investors love this "clarity" concept that the bitcoin community cannot seem to grasp?

Why does Wall St demand quarterly reports from every company CEO?

Well, in the words of the worlds richest coward, "if you don't understand by now, then ur obviously too stoopid"

You will not receive a dime of Wall Street money without a company CEO.

but for those admittedly too stupid who still ask why, here's the only answer:


TRUST

You should be able to evaluate a cryptosystem on its properties alone and determine if the system delivers what it states or not without having to trust that any parties are acting in good or bad faith--this type of evaluation assumes that all parties are acting in bad faith and attempts to keep the outcome within a statistical model of acceptable and unacceptable risk. In short:

TRUSTLESS

[TPTB_need_war]

More bad press for ETH:

Valid points about Turing completeness not necessarily being good:
http://www.coindesk.com/turing-complete-smart-contracts/

Some misunderstanding about blockchains, but also some valid critiques:
http://www.coindesk.com/three-smart-contract-misconceptions/

Soon we'll learn that "the emperor wears no clothes"...

Vitalik and a lot of his nerds ARE smart, and they believe in their concepts, but they don't realize that they are TOO SOON, and only marginally useful at that.

They are smart at math. But they lack understanding of what is practical and the way the software development business actually works, because they came straight from school to a "dream job" where they can play on fantasies all day.

[jjacob]

Satoshi left because he knew he was in danger if he was a public persona, he had nothing to gain. It would damage Bitcoin as a project with "a CEO".

Also, the point of Bitcoin is that we don't need "Wall Street CEO's" permission to grow. If they don't want to get involved, others will, and at some point they will be forced to join or sink.

If Wall Street doesn't make the most of this new opportunity, Silicon Valley will. As Jamie Dimon said about fintech "Silicon Valley is coming". At some point, they will see the lost revenue and get involved with crypto companies.

[AlexGR]

I found it extremely hard to believe that floating point can't be supported. Floating point is required in a lot of financial transactions.

Fixed (decimal) point suffices in most cases, which is easily represented with integers.

Bitcoin fractions have 8 decimal places and thus we can represent arbitrary BTC amounts as integer
multiples of 10^-8 BTC (satoshis).

I was doing an excel today with the /2 structure. Look what happens at the 10th halving:

5000000000 (=50btc X 100mn satoshis)
2500000000
1250000000
625000000
312500000
156250000
78125000
39062500
19531250
9765625
4882812.5 (<fractional)

If this is specified as an integer, won't that result to a crash instead of a rounding?

In other news, eth-related:

That sounds like the start of the end for Ethereum. When you can't even manage to keep an forum online. Let me guess big salary for the creators and now is there own wallet empty.
....
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1441198.20

lol?

[TPTB_need_war]

Another reason that smart contract block chains can't work. Synereo and Casper developer Greg Meredith admits that the fees incentivize forking the block chain.

At @38min, Greg points out that there is an insoluble problem in that the value of AMPs will be siphoned off to ETH or BTC units.

[r0ach]

When you notice you have Ethereum in a wallet you haven't dumped:

[Washika]

When you notice you have Ethereum in a wallet you haven't dumped:

Nice animation. I looked many times. I mine some Ethnereum. I sold most of the coin, but still hold a lot.

[YarkoL]

Very nice critique from GMax

Smart contracts in a public ledger system are a predicate-- Bitcoin's creator understood this. They take input-- about the transaction, and perhaps the chain-- and they accept or reject the update to the system.   The network of thousands of nodes all around the world doesn't give a _darn_ about the particulars of the computation,  they care only that it was accepted.  The transaction is free to provide arbitrary side information to help it make its decision.

Deciding if an arbitrarily complex condition was met doesn't require a turing complete language or what not-- the verification of a is in P not NP.

In Bitcoin Script, we do use straight up 'computation' to answer these questions; because that is the simplest thing to do, and for trivial rule sets, acceptably efficient.  But when we think about complex rule-- having thousands and thousands of computers all around the world replicate the exact same computation becomes obviously ludicrous, it just doesn't scale.

[balu2]

ETH? Ask for undenyable proof the presale wasn't selfbought. Guess, what: that proof is impossible to produce.

Why are people even wasting their time on discussing presale-scams as if they had ANY relevance?

[TPTB_need_war]

Very nice critique from GMax

The juicer part:

All of these radical improvements in scalablity, privacy, and flexibility show up when you realize that "turing complete" is the wrong tool, that what our systems do is verification, not computation.  This cognitive error confers no advantage, outside of marketing to people with a fuzzy idea of what smart contracts might be good for in the first place.

More powerful smart contracting in the world of Bitcoin will absolutely be a thing, I don't doubt. But the marketing blather around ethereum isn't power, it's a boat anchor-- a vector for consensus inconsistency and decentralization destroying resource exhaustion and incentives mismatches. Fortunately, the cognitive framework I've described here is well understood in the community of Bitcoin experts.

But Gmax is missing one insight. That being that verification doesn't need to replicated at every node in order for it to be decentralized. That is my little secret for now 

[TPTB_need_war]

At the moment, they don't really have any competition or at least any that markets their services very well.

Potentially another manipulated market such as the argument about Mt.Gox bubble upthread. We could be witnessing a cashing out from recent altcoin bubbles while buying from himself to create the illusion of a rising price while doing so as they ostensibly did for the ETH bubble, e.g. Vitalik using Coinbase to cash out from ETH -> BTC -> USD.

Free markets = decentralized markets.

When you have whales and most volume going through 1 or 2 exchanges, you don't have decentralized markets.

Seems they got wind of my posts about the legality of ICOs and disclosure.

You think this has anything to do with you, a random stranger on the Internet just like me and the next guy? Wow, this is pretty intense

You need to read the Ethereum Paradox and "The altcoin topic everyone wants to sweep under the rug" threads to understand I am not a random stranger. Didn't you know I am alleged to be Satoshi?

I sincerely wish for him to be the first fiat BILLIONAIRE in the altcoin universe! He deserves it. He made invaluable contributions to crypto-currencies in general !

You're drunk on the Ethereum Paradox Koolaid.

Do you know what a drunk looks like to the sober observers.

Afaics, he didn't contribute an iota of technology that is important.

[r0ach]

I sincerely wish for him to be the first fiat BILLIONAIRE in the altcoin universe! He deserves it. He made invaluable contributions to crypto-currencies in general !

You're drunk on the Ethereum Paradox Koolaid.

Do you know what a drunk looks like to the sober observers.

Afaics, he didn't contribute an iota of technology that is important.

I just remembered you didn't like the thread title that much, but it was kind of a parody of the "blub paradox", with the best practice of always choosing the most powerful programming language.  I believe Vitalik was familiar with it and took that idea literally when creating this contraption, except it's not actually a viable choice in this case.