> Plus, gas fees. It's currently cheaper to wire money than to send some ETH.
Wrong. If all you wish for Christmas is to send some ETH, look no further than into ZK-Rollups such as zkSync & Loopring.
1) A transfer costs around $0.01 in fees.
2) ZK-Rollups are not sidechains. These are layer 2 solutions that settle on Ethereum with a novel trust model of 1-of-N: you only need to trust that a single node is honest!
3) Exchanges (such as Coinbase) would eventually support depositing/withdrawing to a rollup, which means most folks would never need to interact the expensive base layer directly.
Sending money across countries has never been cheaper, faster & as secure as it is now on an Ethereum ZK-Rollup.
> examples that wouldn't be better served by a database are basically non-existent.
If you say so, then here's a question for you.
Using only non-blockchain databases, can you build an exchange that is..
1) Owned by no one, or owned by a community to which anyone can join.
2) Unstoppable. Can't be shutdown even if you cold murder the entire team.
3) Can't be regulated (will never do KYC/AML).
4) Permission-less: anyone can trade and/or provide the liquidity.
5) Open-source with indisputable proof that it *always* runs *exactly* and *only* the code it shows on GitHub.
In other words, can you build Uniswap [1] with MySQL?
24/7 global market with exposure to almost every asset class including new ones with billions of notional USD in liquidity and where people actually are, is that not good enough?
I’m specifically referring to non-custodial decentralized exchanges and automated market maker systems like Uniswap, trading tokenized versions of things.
Every asset class is 99% speculation, including national currencies. Weird when people look at crypto by this other fictional higher standard that no other asset class would achieve while dismissing speculation as a lesser non-use case, not saying you did but predicting someone else was about to.
If you use tokenized versions of things, don't most of the 5 benefits listed previously break down?
If you have an entity selling some tokens representing GOOG on some blockchain, then this entity can (will) be regulated, is a central point of failure, and so on. This problem of interfacing a blockchain with the real world seems like a common theme that's swept under the rug, and I've never seen a convincing answer. What am I missing?
oracles. people are using APIs to get pricing data of real world access, and create entire nodes of networks that have to agree, in the blockchain space they call these oracles. for tokenized assets this just makes them synthetics, indeed one of the biggest services you can use for creating and trading synthetics is called "Synthetix"
a centralized asset backed model is only one possibility and that does have the central point of failure.
it is extremely lucrative to build these API and API networks right now as an 'oracle provider', and decently lucrative to be a highly available oracle.
In the crypto space, both the oracle provider is tokenized with the tokens being typically used to get access to the API network (friction is reduced in some models by only charging/bonding the nodes that want to join the network, instead of consumers) ie $LINK, $BAND, $TRB, $DIA, and the derivatives provider would be tokenized as well ie. $SNX, alongside all the tokens you want to create and trade, or just trade
I guess it's not using just one oracle, otherwise you still have a single point of failure, right? So N oracles are used? What happens if 1 out of N is malicious? k out of N?
How do you check that the N oracles are not actually run by the same person behind the scenes? How do you make sure that it's not economically profitable for an entity to run these N oracles and send bogus data, even if only once?
Ethereum's upcoming 2.0 release kinda solves the issues you raised there.
1. Energy waste: solved by staking instead of mining. See proof of stake [1].
2. Centralized mining: staking in Ethereum 2.0 should be possible with a Raspberry Pi 4, therefore the viability of joining the network isn't closely tied to your geographic location as it is with mining (mining is only profitable with cheap electricity & hardware, which is why China is dominating Bitcoin mining right now).
3. Facilitates crime: well, that's still a problem, but it's also a problem with other things that give anonymity. Is Tor detrimental to society? Is cash detrimental to society? Should we force everyone to stop transacting with cash since most crimes are done with it, and like China to force them to transact digitally where it can all be tracked by the government, banks and corporations?
4. No intrinsic value: you should check out what's going on with DeFi (decentralized finance) right now in the Ethereum world. Over $2B is locked into smart contracts, people aren't just HODLing anymore, they're playing. Sure, it's not used to save the planet just yet, but I definitely believe it will develop to be enormously beneficial to society. Would love to elaborate if you want.
5. Stability: solved with stablecoins. Basically, you transact with a token that keeps it's value stable against a real world currency. DAI is a good example of a USD stablecoin. This defeats the "ponzi scheme" argument as well, since you can interact with many smart contracts with a stablecoin instead of a cryptocurrency. Your choice. If you acquired a cryptocurrency (which is somewhat like a stock) instead of a stablecoin and lost money, it's your fault.
I really like your article, well said. The issues you've raised are still real and need to be discussed. Nevertheless, I argue that those issues can, and are, being solved...
At least 4 of these issues had no solution 10 years ago, but just like innovations (proof of stake, stablecoins) fix them, further innovations will slowly fix other unsolved issues as well.
Same. I love Go, the language, much more than PHP, but Laravel.. Laravel is really great.
I wish Go had something as convenient and complete as Laravel. Unfortunately that's impossible to achieve in a static language without polymorphism (generics) or metaprogramming.
I'm waiting for Go to introduce polymorphism and I'll be watching closely to see how 'post-generics' web frameworks make Go great again!
Another vote for TablePlus. Really solid and support for tons of other DBs. Came from Navicat which crashed a lot. Pricing is way better too. They also make DBngin, a great free tool for spinning up local DBs in a clean, self-contained way.
1) The Ethereum economy will keep growing to disrupt traditional finance
2) Yearn is the greatest asset management protocol on Ethereum
Then why not?