Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, writes on decentralization, proof of stake, zk-SNARKs, and elliptic curve cryptography.
Commenters discuss his decentralization essay and praise his elliptic curve pairings explainer, and one notes a shift in his position on block size.
Opensea uses Google as a caching layer. NFTs on OpenSea can either be created by going through their centralized, counterfactual layer (which doesn't cost gas until someone purchases) or by deploying your own ERC721 smart contract to Ethereum or Polygon and hosting the content however you like. If you follow the ERC721 standard, you can take that NFT to any web store. It is not limited to OpenSea, even if that happens to be the most popular at this time.
> Proof of stake means the largest stakeholders can unilaterally reject transactions. Technically the chain could fork. Practically, convincing everyone to move to a new chain seems about as difficult as everyone moving off Facebook because a few people get banned.
> Proof of work means the richest people can afford more miners and completely control the chain.
> So where is the decentralization? The only realistic decentralization I can make out is that its possible to build alternative chains, but that very thing is possible today. Its possible to build an alternate payment processor or social network if Visa bans your business, the really hard part is building it and getting the entire ecosystem to actually use it.
On a POW system such as Bitcoin or ETH1, you'd need 51% or more of the hash power on the network, which is more than a hundred Google datacenters worth of hashpower, and you'd have to spend a vast amount of energy in order to execute the attack, and at the end of it all, the community would mount a fork and…
This is pretty good! The arithmetic of elliptic curves gets very complex, but I like how you arrived at points on an elliptic curve just by defining groups and fields. It might be a slight improvement to give a short, Rudin-style explanation of the difference between a set and a field. You could do this from first principles of set theory without being so terse as to be incomprehensible or diving into the axioms; I think the stated goal of little math is fine for the audience, but at the same time such an audience might not immediately understand what “field = set with addition and multiplication defined on it” means. I think a small expansion of the treatment on why the ECDLP is hard would also be good. It's intuitively easy to follow that hard problems can exist, but maybe continue on in showing why this particular hardness assumption works for cryptography (because there are many that do not).
Places to go from here if you enjoyed reading this and want to learn more about elliptic curves and cryptography related to them:
1. http://blog.bjrn.se/2015/07/lets-construct-elliptic-curve.html?m=1
More on an elliptic curve and constructing a hypothetical one.
2. https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/exploring-elliptic-curve-pairings-c73c1864e627
Elliptic curve pairings.
3. https://www.lvh.io/posts/supersingular-isogeny-diffie-hellman-101.html
An intro to supersingular isogeny cryptography, which has a basis in elliptic curves as a mathematical structure, but is fundamentally…
I hate to argue from authority but here is @vbuterin saying the same thing about centralization:
https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274
“Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computeR”
I think you’re mistaken that I don’t know how Bitcoin works. Not only do I know, but I have spoken to many teams doing work in the last 10 years in various alternative systems, and I have even designed alternatives myself.
I used the word server in my analogies. The transactions are, however, all going through one COMPUTER which receives them, puts them in a envelope, and finds the right PoW input to “seal” the envelope, and sends it out to everyone. Whoever does that first, gets the rewards on that chain. If the transactions do not make it into the block, they don’t count on-chain.
Therefore, every 10 minutes, ALL TRANSACTIONS IN THE WORLD must be gathered by one computer, the one that will happen to mint the next block. This is a bottleneck, and it is the cause of the skyrocketing fees whenever the system sees any on-chain adoption.
But it’s actually worse than centralized — because we don’t know who will mint the next block so we have to send everything to on everyone. Imagine if all BitTorrent nodes seeded every file in the world.…
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[ANN] Dogemusk: A New Generation of Meme Token That Exposes Centralized Cabals
As Vitalik Buterin once said:
"Excessive and naïve reliance on any formalism intended to decentralize authority can inadvertently have the perverse effect of reestablishing monopolies and oligarchies. Only by making technical systems that offer a variety of mechanisms for checking concentrations of power and by simultaneously building social ideologies constantly on the lookout for failure modes of these mechanisms can we hope to succeed where previous attempts at decentralizing authority have failed."
While we see first-hand the ridiculous amount of concentrated power platforms such as CoinMarketCap, Etherscan, CoinGecko have and how that may choke many projects which do not belong to their cliques or cabals supported by the same group of VCs.
To embrace Vitalik's vision of radical decentralization, no one will own Dogemusk. Dogemusk will grow itself as an embodiment of the radical decentralized future that first attracted me to the crypto sphere.
If you want to help contribute to the Dogemusk ecosystem and build fun and meaningful applications with MUSK, send me a message or develop yourself.
And if you as centralized exchanges want to list MUSK, do as you wish and check our bulletproof code and simply add MUSK to your exchanges. We will not play your pay-per-play sponsorship game as I know too many ins and outs of this circus show.
If we do not embrace…
What you're saying is absolutely nothing new. There's a lot of FUD and confusion in this thread (no surprise) but this has been apparent from the very beginning. "A Proof of Stake Design Philosophy" [1] makes the essential nature of cryptoeconomics very clear. In short: (a) all currencies are social phenomena (b) all the fancy math does is replace the "men with guns" that protect physical currencies -- that is, currencies must be economically defensible and (c) what actually gives real-world currencies their value is the presence of a tax authority who creates the currency and then demands it back at some later point [2]. PoS creates an absolute demand for the currency; it is nothing more than a formalization of currency power.
> So, aside from being a geeky toy and new market for gambling, where has cryptocurrency actually succeeded?
A better question is -- why are there so many currencies to begin with? Why isn't there a single currency that everybody uses?
Once you understand the answer to this question the value of cryptocurrencies become clear. You said it yourself: currency is inherently a contextual and social value construct. Different communities have different values. Communities that develop currency power will always triumph over communities that don't because they can collaborate more effectively. Currencies don't "succeed," communities succeed -- and they do this partly by leveraging currency power. The answer to your question is right in front of you but…
No serious blockchain relies on proof-of-work. Bitcoin (being forked now) doesn't and ethereum (already forked twice) definitely doesn't.
Blockchains are a social construct and what ultimately protects them are the participants. Exactly like actual currencies they are subject to market forces; people either believe in and want the currency or they don't. It's this confidence that gives the currency strength.
More simply:
"On medium to long time scales, humans are quite good at consensus. Even if an adversary had access to unlimited hashing power, and came out with a 51% attack of any major blockchain that reverted even the last month of history, convincing the community that this chain is legitimate is much harder than just outrunning the main chain’s hashpower. They would need to subvert block explorers, every trusted member in the community, the New York Times, archive.org, and many other sources on the internet; all in all, convincing the world that the new attack chain is the one that came first in the information technology-dense 21st century is about as hard as convincing the world that the US moon landings never happened. These social considerations are what ultimately protect any blockchain in the long term, regardless of whether or not the blockchain’s community admits it (note that Bitcoin Core does admit this primacy of the social layer)." [1]
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-philosophy-506585978d51
The subtlety here is making…