What’s lovely about Ethereum or the idea of crypto is that it will be around for a really long time.
I just watched a video of a women cleaning off a strangers tombstone. She went over the persons story and his life. He was born during the 1850s and died in the 1920s. It was a really nice video.
I think we all want to be able to be remembered by our future generations and for what we all did during our lives. It serves as a noble reminder for those of us know looking at the humble lives our ancestors lived. Yes obituaries are preserved online but they are preserved on servers and by companies that could be long gone in just a few decades. They might cease to exists.
What do you think about preserving your legacy and your place in history by publicly putting it on the black chain?
I don’t think this will be the use case that brings people to crypto but I think it’s something that will be used once they are here after they see the value of it.
It’s incredibly inefficient as a data archive. It’s also incredibly expensive. Why would you spend $5000 to store some data on blockchain that would cost $0.01 using other methods? And there is no guarantee of the permanence of blockchain. At some point, the size of blockchain will become so large, it will be a liability hosting such decentralized databases.
Yes but if the promise of permanence doesn’t offset that cost then there is a fundamental problem somewhere: blockchain is supposed to be permanent, no?
If it’s expensive to store data, then this is a problem even for a blockchain’s normal everyday use. You are correct to generalize, I simply took the starting point OP suggested.
But it is a more general issue around pricing all storage. Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting is a general solution - so when you zoom out and abstract away the single examples, it remains the only sustainable direction to keep fees low and let the blockchain survive forever without intervention.
There’s no guarantee blockchain will be permanent. In fact, because it’s so expensive and inefficient to maintain the blockchain, it’s highly likely it will not be permanent. There are 30,000 blockchains that are already dead because they were not economically viable to maintain.
And right now, both BTC and ETH are not economically viable to maintain. The only way they remain online is because a tremendous amount of resources are being dedicated to marketing their adoption – resources that aren’t getting paid back, resources that only see a return if you can continue to recruit more people to buy in higher. But after 15 years, blockchain still hasn’t proven to be uniquely good at anything in particular. So it’s not looking like it will be around much longer.
Look at all the crypto exchanges that have collapsed. These are not isolated incidents, despite everybody wanting to claim they are. The sad reality is there is no way to operate an ethical, legal exchange because the market doesn’t really create any substantive value. The only value being injected into the market is from dark markets and fraud. While that seems like it might be a limitless resource, it’s not really, and various authorities are clamping down on the fraud.
I have no idea what you mean by “automatic transaction rebroadcasting.” This just seems like another meaningless buzzword.
We have existing systems that are part of solid business models that are self sustaining that can ensure their servers and databases are online and operational in perpetuity. Crypto/Blockchain doesn’t do that. It’s not self-sustaining right now and there’s no sign it ever will.
I get that you guys are sitting on top of tokens you hope will go up in value – so you want to believe I’m wrong. Your “faith” in crypto is not backed up by real world evidence.
You are only proving my point.
The reason I bring up ATR is because it actually fixes a massive portion of the economic model of blockchain that makes it inefficient and unsustainable.
You can cast the pejorative “buzzword” on anything - what do you expect, new solutions won’t get new names? At some point you have to dig a little deeper than the fact that something has a name you haven’t heard of before.
Anyways, and to your point: blockchain can’t be expected to survive if the people who get paid for running it add zero value back into it. We say we are paying security, and we are, but that simply isn’t good enough. If you can’t pay security out of the same funds as infrastructure, then the infrastructure fails without central intervention and your objective security cost is pointless because you can find equivalent vectors on the monopolized infrastructure.
ATR takes money that used to go towards hoarding wealth or crunching numbers and forces nodes to hold data - all data, that should be on chain. It solves the problem you are keen to point out - that infrastructure will collapse even if the chain promotes itself as permanent. ATR gives you economic guarantees of what is only ideological in current chains.
If you’re not too sensitive to new terms, look into Saito. It solves the other problems of sustainability and infrastructure centralization (as an attack and monopolization vector – not to mention scale bottleneck).