There's plenty wrong with Ethereum, but casting miners as 'the working class' is a flawed analogy. The mercantile class would be closer to the mark. Notably, their hashing power is based in real world economic power and they extract an annuity from capital expenditure on mining operations and hardware.<p>I also question whether miners are really providing the labour power, as you might expect the working class to do. They build the roads and keep the lights on but the means of production of value is (or ought to be) the services provided by those writing functionality that makes the network useful, i.e. the smart contract writers. Whether one thinks smart contracts on Ethereum have any value is another question but that was at least the vision.<p>A move to proof-of-stake does not remove the role of miners/validators. Validators will still earn a reward from validating blocks. So it's not as if this 'class' is being disenfranchised totally.<p>Finally the social class analogy entails disjointness of classes, this is certainly not the case for miners, many of whom are major token holders, and some of whom are involved in governance (of course by miners we are taking about the humans controlling the mining rigs not the computers themselves)
"Something here seems awfully similar to the system that crypto-currency was meant to fix. It was meant to eliminate rulers. It was meant to make everyone accountable for their actions. It was meant to reward the intelligent, the hard working and the capable, and not reward the incompetent, or the makers-yet-breakers of promises. However, this repeat of the broken old system seems to be playing out again."<p>One response is that the promise was not well thought through. The idea was to replace "rulers" (human beings who make decisions to take care of a system) and "law" (written rules interpreted by humans) with code. But (a) code is written by humans who make mistakes; (b) the world changes, and systems need to update to respond to that; (c) somebody has to be responsible for dealing with a and b. As a result, currencies <i>need</i> central organizers to look after them. And those central organizers need to be motivated, i.e., paid. Old-fashioned currencies have sovereigns to back them, and the sovereigns are paid by the monopoly of taxation and/or the ability to issue money. Inefficient, but it works.<p>From this perspective, bitcoin et al. look like technical solutions to social problems. In particular, bitcoin is designed to have nobody taking care of public goods problems on its behalf. That's a flaw![1]<p>[1] <a href="https://wyclif.substack.com/p/thought-bubble-defending-bitcoin" rel="nofollow">https://wyclif.substack.com/p/thought-bubble-defending-bitco...</a>
Seems like one of the core arguments of this is that the the core devs have pushed the difficulty bomb multiple times because they've missed their original timelines for switching to PoS without any repercussions.<p>It seems to me that this is actually the correct thing to do. I'd rather the core devs take their time and iron out the issues instead of being incentivized to play fast and loose with a system that manages billions.
> working class — a group that does the work the community needs to operate it.<p>It would be more correct to call miners a Merchant Class. They exploit capital to make profit. Like merchants of old, they take risks that regulations (real-world and the "ruling class") won't impede profit.<p>Hardware gets outdated quickly as mining difficulty rises, so a timely exit is not difficult - wait until cards die, or offload them ebay.<p>> As a Bitcoiner I find these actions intolerable and unacceptable<p>Bitcoin has also forked, many times. Bitcoin Gold for example restored the ability to mine with GPUs. The "ruling class" decided that unless you had access to custom hardware, you could not be part of the "working class".
If nearly half the text is bolded, what’s the purpose of the boldface? I feel like there’s a 51% font attack brewing within the article.<p>Regarding the content, the class allegory itself can go the other way as well: the core developers can be thought of as the workers, the miners are the owners of means of production etc.<p>The one point that’s relevant is the rule-making: the DAO hack hard fork has proven that Ethereum’s boasts of decentralization are dubious at best.
A lot of comments here criticise the analogies made in the post. While the criticism might be correct, I feel this is like missing the forest because of the trees..<p>Etherium, and most crypto-currencies for that matter, were initially made to fix a broken financial system, where banks unjustly control too much wealth, and changes the rules so that they will always control too much wealth.<p>Etherium does not fix this, it merely copies this system, with all its flaws(and some new ones). That is why etherium is pointless. It does not provide value to society, as it utterly fails to solve the problem it identified.<p>There is no other crypto-currency that does solve this problem, but then I guess some of them never tried to in the first place.
Miners are most definitely not the working class and they're not doing any useful work. This sounds harsh because most individual miners aren't hostile in any way - but if miners were a one entity, there would be no exaggeration at all.<p>Collectively, paying miners is like paying the mob to not destroy the system, as they are only group with the power to do so. Without miners at all attacks would be impossible. 51% attacks on ETC show that the threat is real.<p>The working class are users - people using and building on ethereum. Their wealth is continuously drained by the mob, but there is hope - a wall staffed by militia is being slowly erected. It's called proof of stake, and once finished, the mob can finally be told to fuck off.
In the meantime the absolute value of protection money paid to the mob has grown several times, making it possible to reduce the protection payments percentage rate without impacting security of the people.
This is overlong and pretty florid, but its conclusion (that a long record of forked changes, each being good for big ETH holders but bad for miners, is roughly equivalent to the self-dealing of wealthy insiders in the traditional financial world) doesn't seem wrong.
That this gets upvoted to #2 speaks poorly of HN. Why on earth are we still talking about the DAO? This is a collection of tired, irrelevant arguments that entirely ignores product-market fit and a large, vibrant community of developers.<p>[edit] ah, of course. a bitcoin maximalist. how dare there be an alternative use-case for crypto that involves people <i>using it.</i> the thing bitcoin has going for it is a large community of peripheral people believing it will be the global reserve currency (it wont).
> As a Bitcoiner I find these actions intolerable and unacceptable. I know none of them would ever be accepted in Bitcoin.<p>This sums up the whole piece in my view. Bitcoin development stagnated years ago exactly because nobody involved wanted to change/hard fork it to implement improvements.<p>For people who want a Bitcoin-like Ethereum with no DAO fork or staking there's Ethereum Classic.
It takes a lot to build a community.<p>The way that article portrays it ties more into an allegory. Let's not forget that every participant is there voluntarily, and if they are genuinely suffering, they will choose to move on. Ethereum is a powerful connecting force that brings trust within the internet.
I think if anything the crypto-experiment has revealed is that an uncaring, cold machine doesn't meet the needs of the human condition. A person fat-fingers his life savings to null, a thief socially engineers someone's money, a bug causes assets to be trapped, etc. It's clear we need a better system that can service our imperfections.
This article actually explains certain aspects of Crypto way better than actual articles that try to explain Crypto.<p>E.g., I've been wondering why a certain Bitcoin podcaster, who is very popular, has never mined a Bitcoin. He/she talks all day about "stacking Sats", but he/she only buys them. Reading this article made me realize that he/she might see him/herself as a member of the ruling class.
Everything wrong with crypto is the notion you can make a global reserve currency impervious to special interests. It’s going to be gamed by the people at the top, they will use all and any leverage to change the code to favor them more. They will extract the value from the system like they have every other system and the easiest part is that stakeholders like you and me don’t get any vote. You can’t decouple monetary policy from governance, it just isn’t sustainable. Fiat will always be better for the stability of finance and governance bc citizens (stakeholders) perceive or have a tiny lever of control. Crypto gives you no control as a citizen, and you will become discontent with the impotence of your lawmakers to pay for laws having no sway over the system preventing them from spending. Keynes hasn’t been disproven yet and so deflationary currencies are pretty much insanity, the business people will turn every deflationary coin into their own inflationary piggy bank. History proves me right.<p>National governments the world over will gladly ban crypto before raising income taxes. They have backed themselves into this corner with the central banks and they won’t be able to resist its ease.
> Something here seems awfully similar to the system that crypto-currency was meant to fix. It was meant to eliminate rulers. It was meant to make everyone accountable for their actions. It was meant to reward the intelligent, the hard working and the capable, and not reward the incompetent, or the makers-yet-breakers of promises. However, this repeat of the broken old system seems to be playing out again.<p>Was it? Most of these goals were definitely not talked about when Bitcoin was first invented, and to this day I wouldn't say this is the list the vast majority of people in the crypto space would come up with if you asked them what the point of cryptocurrency is.
If something is hard in theory, it's 10x harder in implementation. Complex systems have a lot of 'unknown unknowns' that can't be forecasted. Ethereum is $300B+ live network so every small change takes time to research, test, and implement. Migrating from PoW to PoS is like swapping out the engine of an airplane in mid-air.
Long story short - hype and broken promises. About security. About scalability. About proof of stake. About code is law. About the world computer. About deadlines and timetables. All the way to the very beginning of the project, although the author doesn't go there. Make the thing so damn complicated few can reason about it or see the time bombs hidden behind the marble pillars.<p>That's a recipe for a high priest class.<p>Still, the hoards eat it up. It's a testament to the power of complex, flawed ideas, marketed to the hilt, and the promise of riches if you stick with the leadership.<p>It's really a recipe for a technology religion.
Did Ethereum ever make a promise that "code is law"? The references I'm finding are all in Ethereum Classic docs.<p>Fair point to the author for finding the dynamic nature of Ethereum's progression not to their liking, but it's a real reach to portray it as some kind of class conflict parable.
I emphasize with the arguments here but I differ in my conclusion for two reasons.<p>1. I don't own just Ethereum, its not a boat that I'm riding in, its one of many gambles I'm making.<p>2. The Ethereum network has generated a ton of really good stuff (Smart Contracts, DEFI, NFTS, IPFS, ENS, etc) despite whatever governance problems it has.<p>Cryptocurrencies are far from mature. There is no guarantee eth and btc will still be valuable in 10 years. They could be replaced entirely by new chains with different software.
> No moral questions are seriously considered about whether changing this rule is a breach of the promise made at the time of the constitution of the community.<p>This is patently untrue. These questions literally split the community. The majority chose a direction and moved on.
There are good points here, but I think analogizing the situation into a class struggle within a society is both confusing and specious. Ethereum is not a civilization: it's a piece of FinTech.
Author is looking for perfection in what is essentially a Wild West.<p>I also think it’s asking the wrong questions in a way. Whether Bill Gates should have made billions or not whether he should be in charge and corporate structure is largely irrelevant to Silicon Valley crushing it.<p>Fairness equitability and consistency would be nice but is not compulsory at all
> Excuses are made and explanations are given as to why in this particular case an exception needs to be made to the “Code is Law” promise<p>I really wonder what Ethereum investors think of this. A "precedent" was made. Crypto has yet to come to the real test with governments, courts and the physical laws of humans. With Bitcoin, it can be stipulated that changing the network is impossible or unheard of; but that's not the case for Ethereum.<p>It doesn't help, also, that the network is being "processed" by a few elites (or pools of wealth) that could be, potentially, identified and made to obey the "government/s".<p>This is not the case of Bitcoin where the introduction of KYC for mining will require a hard-fork. Bitcoin (the core chain) has never undertook a hard-fork (which is why a lot of Bitcoin forks are out there).
bitcoin maximalism is the worst.
wealth will tend to concentrate over time anyway (parteo distribution) and a "ruling class" will emerge on bitcoin.
miner's voting with hash power is not the future of cryptocurrency governance.
If bitcoin does not evolve to allow this effectively it will be regulated out of common use.<p>It's possible to experiment and build decentralized governance models directly into blockchains see e.g. <a href="https://polkadot.network/polkadot-governance/" rel="nofollow">https://polkadot.network/polkadot-governance/</a>
(disclaimer not a shill I like the tech)
Calling miners “the working class” is a misleading label no doubt chosen to instill sympathy. By that measure, factory owners in the industrial revolution were the working class.
Ethereum is and has always been the toy of Vitalik Buterin and his cronies. They control roughly 64% of all ETH. Everyone else is just share cropping suckers.
None of the Cryptocurrencies are truly decentralized, at best, they are distributed. They all have devs with access to the repos and devs who can deploy changes.
Especially Ethereum is firmly in the hands of Buterin and company.<p>Both depend on each other.
Without miners, no currency, without code no mining, without very high algo difficulty, no safety.
Is there any network where the inflationary half-life of the currency is something like a week? I've been looking for something like that since I heard that Bitcoin was deflationary.<p>(I was excited about Eth until I learnt its currency had persistent value...)
Author declares themselves a "bitcoiner" and writes things like:<p>> PostNote: This article pairs well with my piece on Bitcoiners having integrity. What it boils down to is there is no integrity in Ethereum and nothing but integrity in Bitcoin<p>Which seems a little...
The social class metaphor is stretched pretty thin, but it can be interested to follow such threads and see where they lead. I suppose it's endlessly interpretable, but here's my take on bringing it down to earth.<p>- Different "classes" have different interests. (1)Miners. (2) Big, rich coin owners. (3) Rule makers and influencers. Group 2 & 3 overlap and might collaborate to screw miners.<p>- The author is thinks fundamentals/promises like "code is law" and such will gradually crack, because absolute adherence will be broken.<p>- Rule making is corruptible.<p>"<i>sounds just like the corrupt fiat money system we’re trying to escape</i>"<p>Sounds to me like you have arrived at "governance." The hope a lot of people had/have for crypto is that it replaces people, institutions and rules with explicit code. Coins would be governed by code instead of people, which works until it doesn't work.<p>Since this is already framed in a historical materialism sense... Imagine a society where all laws come from God, are engraved in stone and adjudicated with trials by duel, ordeal or some other way of leaving things in His mighty hands. This works until it doesn't. A currency crisis leaves 90% of people in debt slavery, and the army can't find enough recruits. A UFC champion is abusing trial by combat to get away with all crime and rob everyone. Stuff no one could have foreseen. One of the rules isn't perfect.<p>IRL, such societies will go one of two ways: (1) They have systemic instability, where the stone tablets can be broken and new rules adopted. Or, (2) they fudge. They have a complete and perfect constitution, and a supreme court that interprets it liberally like the US. Maybe they pretend to have a constitution even though one has never been written, like the UK. It turns out we <i>can</i> make that guy fight a bear instead of some poor prisoner.<p>There's a theoretical option 3: adhere. Play out the consequences whatever that requires. Maybe god wants everyone in debt slavery, and that ufc champion running around robbing old ladies.<p>Everything crypto seems to drive to the extremes. An obsession with perfect. There is no perfect.<p>Say smart contracts work great for collectible sneakers. Yes, it collapses when a judge rules to give a sneaker collection back to a guy that got robbed. Does that really make it worthless? Is an institution responsible for cancelling and issuing sneaker coin, on court order, really such a blasphemy?
Cryptocurrency is so unfair. Who do these people think they are, trying to push upon us a new gold?<p>If a new value exchange mechanism is to be invented, it really ought to be one that doesn’t slyly concentrate billions of wealth into the hands of a few. There’s plenty ways of doing that already thank you very much.
Human greed is the problem. How much of promising tech, starts out so innocent till big money becomes aware of it or those who want to make a quick dime, tarnish principled thinking and action.
> By burning the working class’ money, the ruling class and wealthy class end up with a larger piece of the overall pie. It’s ingenious. Evil, but ingenious.<p>The arguments in the article would have carried more weight without the loaded language. Miners are more like banks in a fiat system rather than 'working class'. Pay cuts for middle-men means increase in efficiency of the system. Very evil indeed.
Early crypto adopters are freedom minded people.
I have no problem with a new economic system where the wealthiest are the most freedom-oriented.<p>If crypto ever replaces the current monetary system, late adopters will have to fight for crumbles.<p>And that's OK; you support deception & violence, so you stay poor.
That's cosmic justice.
still related: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykyd4iRi5yc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykyd4iRi5yc</a>
The only value argument of Etherium over Bitcoin is that you can have computation on the blockchain, which is a joke when you consider AWS and Azure exists. The rest are delusional details.
The idea that anyone who is concerned (at least via analogy) about dealing with inflation by knee-caping wages wants to boost <i>bitcoin</i> is, frankly, hilarious.<p>Ah, baby's first step.
I lost interest in Eth when the “code is law” law was broken. I’m glad I did. I don’t believe proof of steak is the correct solution to the energy required for proof of work. To be clear, a lot of good insight has come from Eth, but I’m not ideologically bought in anymore.<p>Recently I have been exploring Chia as a farmer. Rather than the ruling class being a group devs and random early miners, the ruling class is a (soon public) corporation. At least a corporation has a clear legal structure of existence in a capitalist society. I see it as a sort of anchor between a purely cyber community and the actual world we subject ourselves to. I can buy shares in a corporation if I want to participate in the ruling class. The ruling class has legal agency to increase the value of its share price, which is the dual of it’s the underlying asset. Farmers still make less over time but the logistics are clearly laid out in detail, and TX fees kick in to supplement. Maybe it too will all go up in flames, but until it does I’m along for the ride. I believe we can sustain a proof of work system that is orders of magnitude more efficient than constantly running sha. And personally I feel “crypto” has had enough iterations that it’s about time to pick an innovative one and throw some labor behind it.
I would imagine most Ethereum miners are pretty well off by now, so the "working class" analogy is really off.<p>Also "the ruling class" can not really force their rules on others.<p>Everybody participating in cryptocoins right now is hopefully aware that it is an experiment with uncertain outcomes. So the "promises were broken" thing doesn't really convince me, either. I don't think the users of Ethereum were promised a finished product.<p>"Code is law" also only applies if people accept the law. In the DAO case, people decided to change the law, or stick to Ethereum classic.
Oh boy, I see the crypto market is on the rise again so it's time for the HN crypto hot takes to grace our eyes yet again. We get it alright, crypto bad.
The great part about cryptocurrency is that if you don’t want it, don’t buy it - don’t read about it - don’t do anything. It is a purely voluntary system. If you want to avoid US Dollars, it’s essentially impossible for most people.<p>There is no problem with Ethereum.
Who the hell cares.<p>Crypto people were warned repeatedly, since 2017 (and arguably even sooner), that this is all a scam and they should not put their money there.<p>They ignored those messages for years, put the money there anyway (because the number goes up), so, tough luck.<p>Articles "network XY is more decentralized than network YZ" are boring.
Here's some other articles on the problems with Ethereum:<p><a href="https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-Fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...</a><p><a href="https://hugonguyen.medium.com/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engineering-mindset-15e641ab65a2" rel="nofollow">https://hugonguyen.medium.com/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engin...</a><p><a href="https://hugonguyen.medium.com/work-is-timeless-stake-is-not-554c4450ce18" rel="nofollow">https://hugonguyen.medium.com/work-is-timeless-stake-is-not-...</a><p><a href="https://medium.com/hackernoon/sharding-centralizes-ethereum-by-selling-you-scaling-in-disguised-as-scaling-out-266c136fc55d" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/hackernoon/sharding-centralizes-ethereum-...</a><p><a href="https://blog.lamden.io/turing-incompleteness-and-the-sad-state-of-solidity-d5278ba4eda0" rel="nofollow">https://blog.lamden.io/turing-incompleteness-and-the-sad-sta...</a>