Vitalik Buterin

I’d suggest looking at the block explorer for any chain to first understand how many validators they have (there are some hot new chains with fewer than 200 validators which may be run by far fewer than 200 people). I’d also take a look at what’s actually being processed - some blockchains have their validators submit regular transactions to vote for the next block, and they can account for 90+% of the TPS the chain claims to have.

I’d then look at how their consensus model behaves - if it’s Delegated Proof of Stake, how are they handling voter apathy where users have very little incentive to change who they delegate to even if the validator they delegate to is misbehaving? What happens to misbehaving validator? Is there some mechanism in the protocol that punishes a validator for doing the wrong thing (aka slashing)?

I’d then dig into how they are any different from the thousands of existing blockchains. Did they centralize by having a few powerful machines run the chain, did they fork the Ethereum Geth code and simply increase the max gas per block to reduce fees and get a higher TPS? Making short-term decisions like that look great in the short term, but will fail over the long run due to state bloat and centralizing forces (large storage, compute, and/or networking requirements).

I’d also recommend reading articles on https://vitalik.ca/ and https://ethresear.ch/. Before you say “won’t those be bias towards Ethereum?” The answer is, sort of… Vitalik writes a lot about…

Lots of noise in the crypto space and the HN comments are always bad.

BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into (BTC [0] as an international store of value that has benefits over gold, ETH as the core programmable token that backs anything that stores stuff on chain to manage decentralized state). Vitalik is earnest and his writing is pretty great. Everything else I'd probably avoid (except to play with). ZCash's privacy protections are pretty cool. Outside of that risk is extremely high. Lots of bad actors, but also a pretty cool new technology with a new capability for self-custody. If someone tells you you can make 20% risk free returns, they're lying to you.

I feel bad for people that lose everything making dumb bets. It's why all the institutional investor rules exist. It's why there are restrictions on trading with leverage. Still, it's annoying that I'm prevented from making bets (or investing in startups) because of people like this. I understand the purpose of the regulations and clearly there's a need, but it's still annoying.

[0]: https://www.matthuang.com/bitcoin_for_the_open_minded_skeptic

[1]: https://vitalik.ca/

Somewhat related this article was pretty interesting: https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/

Central banks use PID controllers to control stability [1]. Stable coin systems can use PID controller systems too [2]. Stable coins are as volatile as their fiat counterparts.

Crypto currencies are run by people as much as central banks are. People can have opinions and values. People forked of Ethereum into Ethereum Classic because they had an issue with the main chain's policy. ETC community is alive.

Building crypto currencies is all about optimizing for legitimacy [3]. We can build what we want, we just need to want it in the first place. No need to discount a whole field of computer science with a comment.

- 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11403-014-0127-3

- 2: https://github.com/reflexer-labs/whitepapers/blob/master/English/rai-english.pdf

- 3: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

This is already happening; centralized exchanges and staking pools like Kraken make up a high percentage of ETH2 validators (just as PoW seems to gravitate toward large mining pools).

Despite that, PoS has the benefit of offering decentralized staking pools like RocketPool, and the fact that they are growing may indicate that the chain will over time become more decentralized and less able to be centrally attacked[1]. The PoS mechanism itself is also perhaps more resilient to these kind of attacks, see [2].

None of this mechanism is as simple as PoW (which has worked quite well for BTC and ETH so far), but the environmental cost makes it worth exploring an alternative mechanism.

[1] - https://uk.style.yahoo.com/valid-points-ethereum-2-0-113000527.html

[2] - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

This article would have been interesting in 2014. The idea that energy efficiency and scalability are important problems is not new, and are being worked on for Ethereum and other advanced blockchains; see [1] or Vitalik Buterin's blog [2].

The critique of on-chain economic inequality is valid, yet there's nothing unique to blockchains about that. One great solution is to pass more progressive income taxes, a wealth tax, or a UBI (people pay taxes on crypto gains). Also, many in the crypto space are working [3] on an on-chain UBI, even if they are facing an uphill battle.

[1] https://eth.wiki/en/faqs/problems

[2] https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/11/22/progress.html

[3] https://joincircles.net/

Fundamentally, cryptography alleviates the need for third-party trust, and opens up for losing your keys.

It’s a tragedy that we don’t have social recovery as part of our online networking. I can lose access that my friends and family can not recover on my behalf. I may not give anyone my SSH keys, but surely my iCloud pictures are worth something to my relatives if I should get hit by a car.

Vitalik Buterin wrote

> One analysis of the Bitcoin ecosystem suggests that 1500 BTC may be lost every day - over ten times more than what Bitcoin users spend on transaction fees, and over the years adding up to as much as 20% of the total supply.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html