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comment by dublinben
dublinben  ·  1037 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

The fact that they're not even trying to run this off the corporate cloud goes to show how poorly the "decentralization" aspect of this experiment is going. The barrier to entry here is obscene.





kleinbl00  ·  1037 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There are plenty of options to run it on AWS, Azure, GCP, whatever. One of the options I've looked at is a turnkey "you sign up for AWS, we build you a staking node" service where they basically set up your shit and you load it up once they've walked away.

The problem is that this shit runs closer to the singularity than money has ever run in the history of money. Fundamentally, sending or receiving on the blockchain (any blockchain) is like ditching your credit card or checking account and plugging right into ACH. ACH has never been accessible to humans before - I don't know if you've done a wire transfer at the bank but there's a two-page form that you have to triple-check, double-initial and even then the teller freaks out and makes you read everything over again and even then there are do-overs on ACH.

The democratization of blockchain is, for better or worse, "fuck all that shit."

Everyone I know who bought Ethereum at the command line is... on Hubski. That was some scary shit. It was also mind-blowingly lucrative. Anyone who did it and held is up five orders of magnitude - fuck last week's dump, if you bought at Frontier and are still holding, you are up 512,000%. And here's the thing - 80% of ETH is on addresses that haven't transacted in more than five years. There are monsters in the deep and their opportunity cost is fuckall to six decimal places.

Staking is likely to be extremely financially dangerous. Right now? It appeals to true believers who have been on the ride since Obama was president. Eventually? It'll be a bank thing. I mean right now your easiest move is to transform your ETH to ETH2 on Coinbase and sign up for their waiting list.

But this is not an "easiest move" posse we're talking about. These are first movers, and their risk profile is different.