I always found it hilarious that one of the main selling points for ADA was that it is peer-reviewed as if that meant something. The amount of absolutely atrocious peer-review science that is published every year is amazing, so I never really got why they insist so much on that.
This might be just prejudiced, but Charles looks to me like a very good and honest guy, but a bit delusional. And I cannot really stand the (probably good intended) paternalism that he distils when they talk about Cardano being adopted in Africa (teaching Haskel is the way to go, really??)
Don’t forget though, that they can talk beautiful things about how Cardano works, but right now is just promises, they don’t even have SC capabilities yet (!) I expect they come across many problems once they start doing real things, and probably by that time, Ethereum will probably be too far to catch up.
Having said that, Cardano seems like a promising project, but it is difficult to predict how the landscape in the crypto space will be in a few years. It might very well be that Cardano still exists but it has just a very residual influence since Ethereum has the advantage of being the first mover. Or it could be that some of the big companies push forward any Ethereum competitor to balance things out. It is hard to predict. But to me, investing some money in ADA seems like a risk worth taking.
If you publish an algorithm in a peer reviewed journal then an academic can publish a paper demonstrating how that algorithm is flawed. Interfacing with the academic community is a good step for getting complex algorithms to work well.
Yes, but Bitcoin for instance is neither peer-review, nor published in a standard journal. There is however a massive community very interested in discovering bugs or flaws and the algorithms, and that’s all you need. I don’t see why doing this in a formal academic setting would be significantly better. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying is a bad thing. I am just saying that it is funny they want to sell that as one of the main points of their project.
Bitcoin is flawed in that the Chinese government has the power to freeze Bitcoin addresses if it wants and it seems to me that the massive Bitcoin community doesn’t understand that fact. It seems that when the Chinese government takes step to reduce it’s power over Bitcoin the Bitcoin price falls which is very strange.
Besides that, Bitcoin is a fairly simple protocol and not very innovative as far as adopting new innovations. If you don’t do innovation it’s less of an issue to be certain that the innovations don’t have vulnerabilities.
In contrast to Bitcoin Ethereum/Cardano/Polkadot want to be at the leading edge of what’s possible with crypto-technology.
70% of all mining power is controlled by miners on Chinese soil. Companies in China have to do what the Chinese government orders them to do. If the Chinese government tells miners: ‘You can’t create blocks that include transactions that move bitcoin out of a certain address or blocks that build on blocks that do so, you are also not allowed to export any mining equipment out of China’, the address is effectively frozen as the Chinese miners together create the longest chain of blocks and the longest chain of blocks happens to be the official one.
Miners outside of China can then either create blocks that get soon invalidated as they are not part of the largest Bitcoin blockchain or they also follow the guidelines of the Chinese government.
The only difference to be ability of US government to tell banks to freeze US assets is that the Chinese government can only freeze accounts but not dispossess them.
You will likely get a bunch of Bitcoin forks afterwards. Chinese miners are going to mine what’s most profitable for them to mine under the circumstances. Then there’s likely going to be a lot of chaos, a lot of people sell Bitcoin and it’s not clear what value Bitcoin will have after everything plays out.
Interesting take. That would be effectively destroying (temporarily) the Bitcoin network and a massive blow to the credibility of cryptocurrencies. This applies though to any PoS algorithm in which the token owners are most of them in China, right? How is PoS different from PoW in this regard?
his applies though to any PoS algorithm in which the token owners are most of them in China, right? How is PoS different from PoW in this regard?
ChristianKI mentions a few things but I think the important one is what happens after a fork. If a majority of miners in PoW behave abusively the game is over, there’s no fix except building even more mining. If a majority of stakers in PoS behave abusively, you fork once and burn their coins and then the problem is solved forever. If the abuse is clear, then that’s a relatively easy problem (and e.g. the ethereum community seems well enough organized to fix the problem even if it’s kind of subtle).
The reason why 70% of all mining power is concentrated in China is downstream of economic policy that provides very cheap electricity costs. The incentives lead to China being the place for mining proof of work.
This applies though to any PoS algorithm in which the token owners are most of them in China, right?
Only if those token owners tell the Chinese government about the fact that they are token holders. Buying crypto-currency is generally illegal in China.
The economic incentives with PoS is to either not tell your government about the fact that you own the currency or hold them in a jurisdiction with the least amount of legal issues that come from holding the crypto-currency such as a tax haven.
If you are a Chinese billionaire (or similar person with access to a lot of capital) and want to get into earning from PoS you can create a company in a tax haven and let them hold the stake for you in a legal structure that’s optimized for not being able to be confiscated by the Chinese state and ideally outside of their sight.
That way if the tides turn within China you can easily leave China and still have your wealth.
Datacenters are location bound and under the control of their host country in a way that digital crypto ownership isn’t.
Furthermore, even if the Chinese government would be able to secure control over the proof of stake currency all you need to do to solve the problem is a hard fork that burns all the tokens that the Chinese government holds. Doing the DAO fork in Ethereum was controversial but Vitalik could still do it. If Vitalik says that Ethereum has to do a hard fork to get rid of the Chinese government interference it’s easy to get the important players to join in. This means that the Chinese government would burn hundreds of billion of capital under Chinese control for freezing accounts for a few days or 1-2 weeks which seems like a stupid move. Crypto is all about game theory ;)
There’s no way easy way to get rid of the data-centers that effectively mine in PoW. You can start by switching your PoW algorithm to invalidate their ASICs in a hard fork but that doesn’t change the fact that the Chinese data centers still have cheap electricity. Finding consensus on a change of the Bitcoin proof of work algorithm is also very hard.
massive blow to the credibility of cryptocurrencies
It would likely lead to currency besides bitcoin also be sold off and people focus more on the actual value provided by crypto. Proof of stake currencies that actually provide economic value via smart contract based applications and whose value isn’t entirely based on speculation will have less of an issue and regain value.
And I cannot really stand the (probably good intended) paternalism
Finance is basically the least paternalistic way of helping people, pretty much everything they’re doing leaves all of the decisions about how it will be used to Ethiopia, Ethiopian developers, and the end-users.
And don’t forget that ADA is peer-reviewed!
I always found it hilarious that one of the main selling points for ADA was that it is peer-reviewed as if that meant something. The amount of absolutely atrocious peer-review science that is published every year is amazing, so I never really got why they insist so much on that.
This might be just prejudiced, but Charles looks to me like a very good and honest guy, but a bit delusional. And I cannot really stand the (probably good intended) paternalism that he distils when they talk about Cardano being adopted in Africa (teaching Haskel is the way to go, really??)
Don’t forget though, that they can talk beautiful things about how Cardano works, but right now is just promises, they don’t even have SC capabilities yet (!) I expect they come across many problems once they start doing real things, and probably by that time, Ethereum will probably be too far to catch up.
Having said that, Cardano seems like a promising project, but it is difficult to predict how the landscape in the crypto space will be in a few years. It might very well be that Cardano still exists but it has just a very residual influence since Ethereum has the advantage of being the first mover. Or it could be that some of the big companies push forward any Ethereum competitor to balance things out. It is hard to predict. But to me, investing some money in ADA seems like a risk worth taking.
If you publish an algorithm in a peer reviewed journal then an academic can publish a paper demonstrating how that algorithm is flawed. Interfacing with the academic community is a good step for getting complex algorithms to work well.
Yes, but Bitcoin for instance is neither peer-review, nor published in a standard journal. There is however a massive community very interested in discovering bugs or flaws and the algorithms, and that’s all you need. I don’t see why doing this in a formal academic setting would be significantly better. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying is a bad thing. I am just saying that it is funny they want to sell that as one of the main points of their project.
Bitcoin is flawed in that the Chinese government has the power to freeze Bitcoin addresses if it wants and it seems to me that the massive Bitcoin community doesn’t understand that fact. It seems that when the Chinese government takes step to reduce it’s power over Bitcoin the Bitcoin price falls which is very strange.
Besides that, Bitcoin is a fairly simple protocol and not very innovative as far as adopting new innovations. If you don’t do innovation it’s less of an issue to be certain that the innovations don’t have vulnerabilities.
In contrast to Bitcoin Ethereum/Cardano/Polkadot want to be at the leading edge of what’s possible with crypto-technology.
I am not familiar with the Chinese government having the power to freeze Bitcoin addresses. Can you expand a bit on what you mean?
70% of all mining power is controlled by miners on Chinese soil. Companies in China have to do what the Chinese government orders them to do. If the Chinese government tells miners: ‘You can’t create blocks that include transactions that move bitcoin out of a certain address or blocks that build on blocks that do so, you are also not allowed to export any mining equipment out of China’, the address is effectively frozen as the Chinese miners together create the longest chain of blocks and the longest chain of blocks happens to be the official one.
Miners outside of China can then either create blocks that get soon invalidated as they are not part of the largest Bitcoin blockchain or they also follow the guidelines of the Chinese government.
The only difference to be ability of US government to tell banks to freeze US assets is that the Chinese government can only freeze accounts but not dispossess them.
You will likely get a bunch of Bitcoin forks afterwards. Chinese miners are going to mine what’s most profitable for them to mine under the circumstances. Then there’s likely going to be a lot of chaos, a lot of people sell Bitcoin and it’s not clear what value Bitcoin will have after everything plays out.
Interesting take. That would be effectively destroying (temporarily) the Bitcoin network and a massive blow to the credibility of cryptocurrencies. This applies though to any PoS algorithm in which the token owners are most of them in China, right? How is PoS different from PoW in this regard?
ChristianKI mentions a few things but I think the important one is what happens after a fork. If a majority of miners in PoW behave abusively the game is over, there’s no fix except building even more mining. If a majority of stakers in PoS behave abusively, you fork once and burn their coins and then the problem is solved forever. If the abuse is clear, then that’s a relatively easy problem (and e.g. the ethereum community seems well enough organized to fix the problem even if it’s kind of subtle).
thank you both for the explanation, that was very didactic
The reason why 70% of all mining power is concentrated in China is downstream of economic policy that provides very cheap electricity costs. The incentives lead to China being the place for mining proof of work.
Only if those token owners tell the Chinese government about the fact that they are token holders. Buying crypto-currency is generally illegal in China.
The economic incentives with PoS is to either not tell your government about the fact that you own the currency or hold them in a jurisdiction with the least amount of legal issues that come from holding the crypto-currency such as a tax haven.
If you are a Chinese billionaire (or similar person with access to a lot of capital) and want to get into earning from PoS you can create a company in a tax haven and let them hold the stake for you in a legal structure that’s optimized for not being able to be confiscated by the Chinese state and ideally outside of their sight.
That way if the tides turn within China you can easily leave China and still have your wealth.
Datacenters are location bound and under the control of their host country in a way that digital crypto ownership isn’t.
Furthermore, even if the Chinese government would be able to secure control over the proof of stake currency all you need to do to solve the problem is a hard fork that burns all the tokens that the Chinese government holds. Doing the DAO fork in Ethereum was controversial but Vitalik could still do it. If Vitalik says that Ethereum has to do a hard fork to get rid of the Chinese government interference it’s easy to get the important players to join in. This means that the Chinese government would burn hundreds of billion of capital under Chinese control for freezing accounts for a few days or 1-2 weeks which seems like a stupid move. Crypto is all about game theory ;)
There’s no way easy way to get rid of the data-centers that effectively mine in PoW. You can start by switching your PoW algorithm to invalidate their ASICs in a hard fork but that doesn’t change the fact that the Chinese data centers still have cheap electricity. Finding consensus on a change of the Bitcoin proof of work algorithm is also very hard.
It would likely lead to currency besides bitcoin also be sold off and people focus more on the actual value provided by crypto. Proof of stake currencies that actually provide economic value via smart contract based applications and whose value isn’t entirely based on speculation will have less of an issue and regain value.
I don’t know how to help you.
Finance is basically the least paternalistic way of helping people, pretty much everything they’re doing leaves all of the decisions about how it will be used to Ethiopia, Ethiopian developers, and the end-users.