Ethereum - Blockchain App Platform
06-07-2017
, 05:29 PM
06-07-2017
, 06:30 PM
Quote:
Good post and unfortunately I don't have a technical answer. You can probably count on just 1 hand how many people truly could answer those question marks surrounding Sharding/PoS and beyond. They're too busy driving the car so you won't find them posting on a forum. So instead, I'll ramble philosophically for a paragraph. Not with the intention of convincing you on any technical merit, but more as to how I approach and see these long-term uncertainties.
FWIW I waffled and didn't snap believe in ETH at first until I learned how to differentiate and weight different peoples' opinions on meaningful subjects (a soft learned skill that's basically "art" from business experience & poker). This was really hard for me to wrap my head around because my background is a 'standard' Business school degree / online poker. The technical aspect of Ethereum (and all cryptos) is imo the hardest part to understand, especially if you don't have a coding/comp sci background. I've since learned some basic Javascript, and am looking to learn Solidity (and plan to in the coming months) to help overcome this weakness of mine so I can truly understand what's going on under the hood of it all.
I personally enjoy bad analogies and the one I would use is if you need to truly understand the aspect of how a car runs before getting in and driving it, than that's your threshold and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. (Don't get me wrong that's not a flaw, in stocks I'm the guy who reads the quarterly reports and makes sure to actually understand them). In crypto for me at least, I basically absorbed as much as I could from different mechanics, decided what questions are most important to me, found those answers out to the best of my ability, and put in an amount that's not going to break me if I'm wrong. A huge factor for me is I believed even back when it was ~$6 the imagined payoff matrix in my mind of being earlier rather than later in say a proven road map more than offsets the uncertainties. Btw, for people with the mindset thinking it's too late with current market prices, I disagree. If I had any other $ to invest I'd put in now, or if I'm feeling lucky chance & wait a bit for inevitably after some ICO blows up/bad press (momentarily) dents ETHs price. I'd do the former, and consider myself lucky if I had the funds and was in a spot to take advantage of the latter on the chance it happens.
You basically nailed it when you said there are long-term problems that don't yet have publicly available solutions tested in an adversarial environment; simply put it's never been done before. No one can in good faith argue otherwise, as your only true remedy to this problem is time. It's the one thing that removes uncertainty as the road map further develops and matures. Because this is all so new, everyone should think in crypto terms of chance it does this x A%, chance it does this x B% instead of absolutes (this is easier if you also have played poker) How you decide to weight those, it's up to you. I think they'll get there based on everything I know, so I'll be the first to say I'm definitely in the bull camp. I'm the guy saying it's likely (>80%) crypto hits ~1T when it was around ~30B and that it will definitely (>90%) flip on BTC back when the ratio was <.04. Hope this helps you some.
FWIW I waffled and didn't snap believe in ETH at first until I learned how to differentiate and weight different peoples' opinions on meaningful subjects (a soft learned skill that's basically "art" from business experience & poker). This was really hard for me to wrap my head around because my background is a 'standard' Business school degree / online poker. The technical aspect of Ethereum (and all cryptos) is imo the hardest part to understand, especially if you don't have a coding/comp sci background. I've since learned some basic Javascript, and am looking to learn Solidity (and plan to in the coming months) to help overcome this weakness of mine so I can truly understand what's going on under the hood of it all.
I personally enjoy bad analogies and the one I would use is if you need to truly understand the aspect of how a car runs before getting in and driving it, than that's your threshold and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. (Don't get me wrong that's not a flaw, in stocks I'm the guy who reads the quarterly reports and makes sure to actually understand them). In crypto for me at least, I basically absorbed as much as I could from different mechanics, decided what questions are most important to me, found those answers out to the best of my ability, and put in an amount that's not going to break me if I'm wrong. A huge factor for me is I believed even back when it was ~$6 the imagined payoff matrix in my mind of being earlier rather than later in say a proven road map more than offsets the uncertainties. Btw, for people with the mindset thinking it's too late with current market prices, I disagree. If I had any other $ to invest I'd put in now, or if I'm feeling lucky chance & wait a bit for inevitably after some ICO blows up/bad press (momentarily) dents ETHs price. I'd do the former, and consider myself lucky if I had the funds and was in a spot to take advantage of the latter on the chance it happens.
You basically nailed it when you said there are long-term problems that don't yet have publicly available solutions tested in an adversarial environment; simply put it's never been done before. No one can in good faith argue otherwise, as your only true remedy to this problem is time. It's the one thing that removes uncertainty as the road map further develops and matures. Because this is all so new, everyone should think in crypto terms of chance it does this x A%, chance it does this x B% instead of absolutes (this is easier if you also have played poker) How you decide to weight those, it's up to you. I think they'll get there based on everything I know, so I'll be the first to say I'm definitely in the bull camp. I'm the guy saying it's likely (>80%) crypto hits ~1T when it was around ~30B and that it will definitely (>90%) flip on BTC back when the ratio was <.04. Hope this helps you some.
Some very good points regarding the non technical aspects. Btw, if someone does have an answer to those questions, or links to discussions about it, I would be grateful.
Just to put it out there, here are some of the things that worry me/I'm unsure of:
The blockchain will become huge, with all the logic of the smart contracts that will be broadcasted if ETH takes off. If this is solved in some smart way where everybody doesn't have the entire blockchain, then there are risks to both decentralization and attacks against you on parts of the blockchain that you don't have yourself.
It has been made clear a long time ago that there will be a move from POW to POS. Sharding I don't know much about, for POS however I've read from quite a few people who's opinion I value, that there are serious, known attack vectors that no one has presented a defense against. I'm afraid that they will go through with the change even if they haven't been able to find a good solution yet. I have a suspicion that this is their exit strategy if they can't find solutions to all challenges ETH faces. As someone (maybe you?) said about the effect on price when moving to POS, that it will probably go up because the money going into hardware instead goes into buying coins. I feel like if they don't have a good solution by then, they will go with an inferior solution, say that it is good and that people should trust them, then sell off a lot of the coins they've held since inception, and the problems won't happen until after others hold most of the coins and they have made off with a lot of money. Not saying this will happen, but it's one scenario that haunts my analysis.
Actually, most of the potential problems I see are pretty far in the future, like a year off at least, and until then most of the "scheduled" events should be positive for the price. What mostly puts me off is the huge bubble the entire crypto market is in right now, and who the hell knows when that is going to pop. There are of course also random negative events that could happen, but that's part of the risk you're willing to take when investing in this space
06-10-2017
, 12:04 PM
