Scaling and transaction cost have been solved using ZK-rollups. Transactions cost less than a cent and take less than a second. 2000 transactions per second throughput. A lot has changed in the last 2 years.
Ethereum is scalable already. Layer 2 solutions like https://zksync.io/ and https://loopring.org/#/ are already live and allow 2000 transactions per second. This is based on ZK-rollups and provides the same level of security as the base layer. This technology can be used for trades or transfers.
Another exciting technology that is coming this year is optimistic rollups, which will provide the same level of scalability for arbitrary smart contracts.
"WARNING: zkSync v1.0 is in alpha. Blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs are still experimental technologies with rapidly evolving attack vectors. zkSync relies on cutting-edge cryptography that has never been used in production before. While Matter Labs is rigorously following scientific and engineering best practices with regard to security, we can not provide 100% fault-free guarantee. Use zkSync at your own risk and do not put more money into it than you can afford to lose."
That doesn't sound like 'scalable already', it sounds more like be prepared to lose your money.
Further, on the ZK-Rollups website, we have:
"The initial set up of ZK-Rollups promotes a centralized schemeThe security scheme assumes a level of unverifiable trust
The initial setup of ZK-Rollups is assumed to be a trusted state, when this trust cannot be proven. A small group of developers will be subject matter experts on the initial trusted state. This undermines decentralization and opens the risk of social engineering hacking attacks by convincing a developer to manipulate code or provide vulnerability information."
This is not reliable scalable technology. It's centralised so it takes all the supposed advantages of blockchains away, at which point you are better off just using a single trusted database, instead of thousands of machines duplicating the same work.
Layer 1 is expensive. There are other really cool projects that get the same level of security as layer 1, but are much faster and cheaper. For example https://zksync.io/ allows payments that take less than a second and cost less than 1 cent. It’s based on zero knowledge cryptography.
Someone should build a way for people to pay 10 cents per article to read the New York Times without registering using this technology and a stable coin.
It's specifically trading and speculating in cryptocurrencies that's incredibly risky. There's a playbook of scams people used to pull with stocks were made illegal, but are suddenly viable again in the crypto space. There's also the risk of loss because of lax security on your part or the part of your wallet.
Seriously, crypto is one of the shadiest things you can get into. Avoid it, and any exchanges, like the plague. It's interesting tech, but nothing more than that. Hugely speculative and not worth wasting hard earned money over.
There were no ICOs in the last 2 years. The community moved on from that. Decentralized non custodial exchange usage is growing, like https://loopring.org/ that’s based on zero knowledge proofs cryptography and allows 2000 trades per second, and the people who built it can’t steal your money even if they wanted to.
Loopring is interesting, thanks for passing that along.
Even with the options on ethereum, Tether alternatives, etc. involvement with cryptocurrencies has high risk for someone who doesn't have a strong understanding of how it all works at a technical level, which is what the parent comment stated.
Sure, many of those won't be using ethereum, but they still happened. And that's before you dive into the IEOs and STOs, which appear to be more of the same.
Yes, in the same way an online stock market interface is a betting site. In the same way that stock markets allow (in principle) accurate valuation of companies through people buying and selling stocks, a prediction market should enable better-than current prediction of the future- because the people making the predictions have skin in the game, and have an incentive to change their prediction if they genuinely think the event will go the other way.
Why do people instantly jump to the extreme negative? Any technology can be used for to do bad things. The community is aware of this possibility and have taken precautions. Also any financial market can also be viewed as an assassination market. You can short a stock and assassinate the CEO and profit, but people don’t actually do that in practice. Also, Augur v1 (V2 is coming out this month) has existed for about 2 years and there were no assassination markets on it. The community would resolve them as “invalid”, so it’a not possible to guarantee profit unlike in the regular stock market.
If people tout anonymity and 'censorship resistance' as a market's main advantage over other markets, it's hardly surprising that people focus on the use cases - hypothetical and otherwise - which wouldn't be possible on prediction market platforms where the platform operator knows their customer and rules out certain types of trade. If your USP is the ability to do 'bad things' to manipulate outcomes [manipulating the 'reporting' is probably a likelier outcome than assassination, admittedly] with little chance of your trades being discovered or reversed then people are going to focus on that.
It's permissionless access to financial markets that are guaranteed to remain running, and to operate according to the rules encoded in their smart contract, indefinitely.
Its properties make it enormously valuable for applications involving large numbers of people coordinating amongst each other.
Ethereum's DeFi has seen collateral increase from $750 million on April 1st to $2 billion today, so people are seeing utility in it.
A perfect killer example is globally accessible prediction markets. They always get shut down by governments. Isn’t it crazy that you currently can’t place a bet on a horse race or a presidential election in the US?
Having reliable, auditable, public protocols which can operate without the blessing of the world’s existing governments is precisely the point.
Killer examples include any products or services which would provide a net positive value to society but are currently outlawed within various geographic territories for superstitious reasons and/or to protect existing industries from competition.
Prediction markets are an excellent example here: a substantial body of research now indicates that 1) prediction markets are superior to all other strategies in predicting any quantifiable event (because they are “meta tools” which inherently incorporate the best information from all strategies) and 2) non-private markets can’t be used for manipulating elections, sponsoring assassinations, or incentivizing real-world action of any sort. (In any prediction market with a public order book, any attempted “action-incentivizing position” can be consumed by arbitrage until all that remains is a measure of the event’s real probability). For several decades, researchers from dozens of universities have lobbied for relaxing the ban on prediction markets in USA, with little progress to show. Until that ban is lifted (which could take decades longer), blockchain-based prediction markets will have no domestic competition.
Also worth noting: even in the presence of legal, centralized prediction markets, decentralized prediction market protocols may still be competitive because they require far less counterparty-risk, allowing them to safely support higher volumes and larger positions.
> non-private markets can’t be used for manipulating elections, sponsoring assassinations, or incentivizing real-world action of any sort. (In any prediction market with a public order book, any attempted “action-incentivizing position” can be consumed by arbitrage until all that remains is a measure of the event’s real probability)
Source(s) for this?
I know prediction markets will have far-reaching consequences when they aren’t or can’t be constrained anymore.
The mere presence of a payout for low-probability is a broad change. Maybe I’m not being paid to kill someone via the market directly, but I am naturally incentivized to collect information about the world, gain power, and then use my power to bet on and make low-probability events happen.
Another question - How do we solve the decentralized oracle problem without relying on decentralized votes that could be biased due to past voting behavior or their vested interest in the outcome of a truth vote?
> Some worry that censorship-resistant prediction markets will be used to encourage assassinations (and other crimes); this concern does not hold up to a sober examination. “Assassination markets” (AMs), as originally proposed by Jim Bell, are irreconcilably different from Prediction Markets (PMs). My experimental method for funding public goods with PMs has features which render it incompatible with crime. Furthermore, markets would generally present an excessively-complex, risky, and convoluted form of criminal financing. Truthcoin presents a (peaceful) alternative for accomplishing ideological goals, which features greater persuasiveness as well as lower cost. I conclude with a short discussion covering [1] recourse for those affected by AMs (of any kind), [2] features of Truthcoin designed to amplify the inherent impracticalities of AMs, and [3] the (necessarily relevant) total net effect of Truthcoin on political assassinations, general crime and general human welfare.
The linked paper does a thorough job of explaining this scenario, but to summarize: yes, in the absence of other market participants you might try to bet on low-probability events and make them happen. But because it's a public market, anyone can see the anomalous "predictions" you have made, and "free ride" on or even "front run" your position, including your accomplices (who can also sabotage you). On net, your position will be mostly consumed by arbitrage, your payout will be inconsequential compared to the capital required, and the probability "returned" by the market will remain accurate.
Decentralized prediction markets also offer global liquidity, so the counterparty can be located anywhere on earth. Also the friction and fees should be much lower. If someone in Mongolia wants to bet a million dollars against someone in Colombia today, it’s extremely hard to do without a blockchain (think about the fees and time to wire the money, who would you be wiring it to, etc). Prediction markets are not just for gambling, by the way. They could be used for earthquake insurance, for example.
No it doesn't. ETC is worth something like 2% of the value of ETH, it's a joke in comparison. Besides, the existence of "Ethereum Classic" is not something special, it's the inevitable side effect of suddenly having the balance of your ETH wallet "cloned" in a fork, you only have to lose if you don't treat both wallets like they're real.
The "community" chose to roll back a $40 million transaction that was very inconvenient for Vitalik. If he had instead said "code is law, and we stand by it" then ETC would never have existed in the first place. My point is, it was Vitalik's prerogative to reverse a million dollar transaction that he didn't like, a privilege reserved for the elite.
Beyond that, the community didn't really have a choice either way. By definition of owning ETH you are incentivized to (primarily) support whichever chain the creator says he will continue to support. What kind of choice is that? There is no "market" in the sense you speak of, ETH users are a captive audience.
It's important to keep in mind that the creators of ETH gave themselves an order of magnitude more coins to start with than will ever be mined. While it is true that some of it has been sold many times over by now, it still creates a power dynamic within the community which can hardly be ignored.
It's especially problematic for a project that was supposed to be PoS, where the coin holders are also the miners, with the privileges that brings.
The existence of ETC says to me that ETH has the same problem, that is a bunch of power users can change the rules if they want to (if it is financially beneficial for them to do so). No different to a fiat currency controlled by the government.
Yeah that's just wrong. If you want to change the rules, you need to update the client software which means forking. Are you saying that a group of core devs can fork the chain and not have it be contentious?
