Which is better, Ethereum or Ergo?

Ethereum was started with a huge pre-mine, as well as an ICO (initial coin offering) where the people who initially put money into it, were rewarded with insane ammounts of ETHER. Everyone who got into ETH since it started, has essentially been fighting a losing battle in trying to gain a tiny portion of ETH, compared to what the original founders kept for themselves and their VCs. In addition, over time the ETHEREUM developers have expressed great disdain for their miners, the same ones who have secured their network and continue to till this day. During ETH’s run, the devs have cut miner rewards mulitple times while lieing to the general public that this will help make gas fees lower (when instead it just made them more predictable, predictably high). They’ve made many statements in the past that miners “get rewarded way too much for what they do” and disparaged them at every turn. The fact it was not considered a security (based on the ICO and premine) is only because of the special considerations the SEC gave them, due to multiple members being formerly of Goldman Sachs, World Economic Forum, the list goes on. And as important as anything else I’ve written, there is no fixed supply and the governance of changing rules whether inflationary or deflationary are at the discretion of just a few people, so it is highly manipulable.

Then you look at ERGO. No Pre-mine. NO ICO. EUTXO model (expanding on satoshis vision and IMO better then Account model). Fixed supply, no way to change the rules on it. Nipopows, Oracle Pools, Sigma Protocols, the list goes on and on, in summation the technology in ERGO is as as cutting edge as it gets in blockchain, and in many ways ahead of the curve. DYOR but the other POW chains are essentially single faceted bloatware or in many cases a total joke compared to ERGO when you look at whats under the hood. As more Dapps come online (and growth has been crazy in the past few months in terms of # which you can find on sigmaverse website) and coding education and envitonrment gets more and and more dev friendly, the sandbox with ERGO gives devs freedom to build anything they’d like with amazing confidence in the security implications, since EUTXO is based on assumptions (the ultimate in KYA).

I know everyone is waiting for ETH mining to shut off and go POS, and that ERGO will win the hashwar (and it most likely will). But that said, I don’t think it would even need to in a hypothetical world where ETH never went POS, ERGO will still become a market dominator in the coming years regardless of ETH’s plans.

  • LegitMAYNEx
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I agree with the narrative you are laying down here. I am with you.

Cardano already has a vastly superior PoS model, compared to what Ethereum envisions, nevermind the problems with Solidity vs a cash and contract model. Algorand and Polkadot do too, in addition to a range of other “3rd generation” blockchains.

I admire Kushti for noting that a 3rd generation blockchain does not need to abandon the security model of PoW… We can reward those that shed time, money, electricity, and also serve as a recruiting ground for interest and promotion of the ecosystem. They will maintain the machine that he wants to further develop. Brilliant, and in this case, generous and inclusive.

These are the salad years, as that technical capability develops and people gather around with more than just mining rigs…

I appreciate your contribution to the discussion here, and elsewhere.

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Comparing Ergo and Ethereum is like comparing Apples with Oranges. Ergo begins with solid blockchain basics and implements new, innovative cryptography natively. The team has a solid background in core cryptocurrency development, including Nxt, Scorex, and Waves. The Ergo team takes a lean approach to their work and remains agile in terms of prioritizing new features and requirements.

Turing-complete smart contracts are powerful, but they can be difficult to execute correctly. Especially in Ethereum while it could be done in Ethereum the costs in GAS fees would out way the incentive. The exponential nature of computing makes it difficult to estimate the cost of carrying out complex computational tasks. Network conditions, bugs, and exploits can mean software may fail to execute as intended. In the worst cases, this can lead to a serious security vulnerability in a dApp.

Ergo contracts are efficient and reliable. They execute tasks predictably and run on concrete costs. The process can still be made Turing complete via script iteration across multiple blocks. This offers versatility in terms of support for versatile applications that run predictably and don’t have the dangers of unrestricted functionality.

Sigma protocols are the foundation of Ergo’s smart contract development. They allow for a class of efficient protocols, or “mechanisms for performing a necessary action without revealing anything about the information involved in the transaction.” Sigma protocols enable Ergo to implement tasks that would be impossible or too costly to execute otherwise.

For example, Sigma provides ring signatures by default. Let’s say you create a “ring spending contract” for two people to spend from the same address, but you want to keep the transactions private. This is not possible with Bitcoin or Ethereum.

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In another thread UTXO (used by Ergo) and the accounting model (used by Ethereum) were compared.

UTXO based blockchains are not an accounting system, they are more like a way to move tokens around in a deterministic fashion, based on cryptographically secured permissions and group consensus about executing the rules. The system consists of these atomic elements, UTXO’s, and runs their logic for their interactions at that level, regardless of what is happening to others. Extending that model allows the movements to be more articulate, but doesn’t change the dynamic. The rules for creating the next block, avoiding double spending, and executing transactions is all just a matter of moving chips.

The global state issue with Ethereum, is that to compute the next block and achieve consensus, all transactions must be checked against each other, and simultaneously satisfy the hunger of the miners for transaction fees. It’s like Vitalik thought Bitcoin was just a calculator, and he wanted a PlayStation instead. As the number of transactions increases with the complexity of competing smart contracts, it will often happen that transactions will get bogged down or outright fail.

There was a popular notion among the ethereum community that Cardano smart contracts would not allow for concurrency, due to this lack of global state. After all, how can you simultaneously support interconnected smart contracts that touch so many accounts without having the entire thing worked out in advance before agreeing on the next block? The answer is to just use a lot of UTXO’s all of which are controlled by you on your own accounting system, rather than trying to let the blockchain be an accounting system.

-@grayman

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Parallelization has always required standards.
Good fences make good neighbors.

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This is a very long read, from someone that you could describe as a bitcoin maxi… but I think it is worth the read to review the basics and reaffirm your calling as an Ergonaut: https://www.uncerto.com/only-the-strong-survive

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@Grayman @Ergosmergo
So far I have anlysized through page 20 of Only The Strong Survive by Allen Farrington & Big Al. The paper is a categorical critic of cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, and a proposition that Bitcoin is the only blockchain project with a value proposition.

I wouldn’t say I have a “calling” as an Ergonaut, I just like the protocol. This Bitcoin Maximalist paper outlines many issues that the Ergo Blockchain addresses.

As far as we can tell, the intention behind the handful of ways this (creation of 2nd/3rd generation Blockchains) has happened is to attempt to improve upon some parameter of the Bitcoin timechain’s operation: its block time or regularity, its inflation schedule, its programmability, its privacy, the difficulty at the layer ofthe timechain to either introduce total token fungibility or definable nonfungibility (arguably a special case of programmability, but also, an enormously poifficulty at the layer ofthe timechain to either introduce total token fungibility or definable nonfungibility (arguably a special case of programmability, but also, an enormously popular one) or more exotic goals as well.

^Ergo fits this description.

Here are a handful of interrelated characteristics that constitute the real innovation of Bitcoin and that delicately balance to give it unprecedented functionality. These are:
i) The proof-of-work algorithm
ii) The difficulty adjustment
iii) The native unit of (only) monetary value
iv) The lack of a founder or acknowledged leader
v) The economic incentive created for distrusting individual actors to achieve distributed consensus, unforgeably and immutably.
This all allows Bitcoin to realize endogenous value as an asset grounded in its security, and endogenous provision of security as incentivized by this asset. Our thesis is that all non-Bitcoin crypto projects, usually in an attempt to add functionality deemed to be an improvement on that offered by Bitcoin or that is even fundamentally impossible to offer on Bitcoin, necessarily sacrifice at least one element just outlined. … the hoped-for functionality is likely to slowly but surely emerge on Bitcoin … which we believe to evidence short-termism: that decentralization is put at risk.

^Ergo fits the description of all of these benefits of Bitcoin, except point iv. Satasohi Nakamoto does prevent a cult of personality. However, I don’t see Kushti reaching cult God-king status in our Ergonaut sphere.

If a timechain is structured so as to contain more than a bare minimum of information (either in the form of economically loaded content that takes up far more data than validation of monetary balance transfers, or just too much validation) then it may reach such a size that it becomes practically or economically impossible for many to either run a node or contribute to security.

^I believe Ergo addresses these concerns with logarithmic mining and storage rent :pinched_fingers:.

Processing approximately 1.5 million unique transactions per day, Ethereum is already at its current max capacity, and transaction fees have spiked as a result. But notice “transaction fees spiking” is good for security! So we have a somewhat perverse situation in which the more secure the protocol becomes, the more its value proposition suffers. In order to become “more usable” it has to become less secure.

^Yes, Ethereum gas sucks for users. If I have USDC I have to pay ridiculous fees to transfer it between addresses. @Grayman Does the EUXTO model address this concern?

67.5% of ethereum nodes hosted on cloud services:

https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types?synced=1
^How does Ergo address this concern? @Grayman

For example, crypto proponents will often cite “overcollateralization” as a reason to be reassured that things can only go so wrong, or that, if things go wrong, we can be relatively sure the various structures in place can be unwound safely and the originators of capital made whole. To be clear on terminology before we get into the weeds, by x% collateralization, we mean every $100 of synthetic asset is backed by $x (i.e. x% of $100) of collateral. By y% overcollateralized, we mean that a synthetic asset is 100+y% collateralized. We will try to stick to the former to avoid confusion unless it cannot be helped.The idea that overcollateralization grants safety might be nice were it nor for a naive arithmetic glitch in the reasoning just presented: only 200% collateralization (or greater) can achieve this systemically. For any lower ratio, there will be some number of iterations of rehypothecating collateral such that the value outstanding ex-initial collateral is greater than the initial collateral.

^sigmaUSD has 400% - 800% collateralization.

As liquidations and collateral calls ripple through the ecosystem, there would only be two ways the bleeding could end. Either nearly all of the leverage in the system would need to be wiped out, which of course would be a catastrophic decline in aggregate value, particularly so given our outline above of just how much pseudo-leverage can exist globally without anybody being locally aware. The alternative option is simply that more capital flows into these assets than the forced selling via the liquidations. The practicalities of new capitalflowing in is worth pondering also. It is possible that this would simply take the form of buying pressure to counteract forced selling pressure; but it is also possible that the buys would be of newly minted assets, hence recycling the liquidity unlockedby collapsing leverage immediately into new leverage. This would have a naturally magnified effect on the valuation of a Blockchain.

^LUNA was an experiment in this. Billions in Bitcoin reserves depleted, LUNA token falls to zero, stablecoin collapses.

edit: formatting, spelling

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Absolutely. First note that tokens run and trade natively, like ergo. So transferring value will always be as simple as that. As for more complicated smart contracts, they might add significant traffic and create bottlenecks and incentives for fee increases. But I think that by not embracing global state as part of the mechanism for running such contracts, the mechanics of calculating complex transaction batches would be handled by the concerned parties, and all the miners need to do is just handle creating suitable blocks as ordered.

Ergo addresses the concern in a few different ways. The mining is ASIC resistant, and even if there are large concentrations of GPU mining power in the form of pools and even rentable hashpower, that does not prevent the average home gamer from mining and running a node. I used to do that with geth and gave up because it was stupid to dedicate that much disk space and I didn’t want to upgrade the rig for no apparent benefit. But on Ergo, I am very happy and I’m just some guy.

The security assumptions of Ethereum all tend towards centralization, not just the bloat and cost of running a simple node. The tokenomics, the lack of asic resistance, the stench of Vulture Capitalists… Ergo is the opposite in every way, and I expect to see more and more miners and nodes of all types, on all continents, underwater, and in space.

Well, USDC and USDT are fully backed by the enormous balls of their founders, as well as commercial and government papers. 100%, but with “real things” - not your magic bean sprouts. Our magic bean sprouts.

ETA: That was obviously sarcasm at the end, but that might not be apparent to some.

Over-collateralization is great, but the problem currently is with the amount of collateral and the consequential lack of liquidity. A similar issue plagues the mixer, or other projects, because we are just getting started. Bear in mind that the collateral and liquidity will improve in proportion to the price, which could provide the type of positive feedback mechanism that leads to massive gains in value. We can all reasonably hope for that with Ergo. There are risks, but there is a clear path. We’re still at the start of the journey.

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Well, I’d guess you aren’t a southerner then. Bless your heart.

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God bless your heart, I’m not a yankee :slight_smile: I was born in the colonies–last bastion of the old ways. Where God, gold, and guns still reign supreme.

I found solace in the spirit of Bonnie Blue Flag. If I venture to the homeland, it will be to the South. Among my peers, only myself and a small band of brothers have escaped being reconstructed to Federalist ideology.

Music is a powerful tool.

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^Wouldn’t scaling for high TX volume be fundamentally different on ergo, because the EUTXO model allows batching together transactions? Recently I believe 15k outputs where batched together in a single transaction. Of course there is still the same amount of data associated with those transactions…

the stench of Vulture Capitalists

^This is something that draws me to ergo. Our current venture capitalists are from within the ecosystem.

Well, USDC and USDT are fully backed by the enormous balls of their founders, as well as commercial and government papers. 100%, but with “real things” - not your magic bean sprouts. Our magic bean sprouts.

USDC is “safe” because Coinbase is a publically traded company. USDT does not have proof of their backing. God help us when USDT tumbles.

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That data will lead to an increase in carrying cost for the platform, and could eventually bloat enough to prevent normal people from running a node on consumer hardware. That would be bad. I am not sure if I am fully understanding NIPoPoW’s, but that may be our perpetual insurance for distributed security on cheap equipment and bandwidth.

But again, the eUTXO model prevents the chain from acting as an accounting system, and this will inherently reduce bloat and congestion.

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Due to the lack of pre-mine, and the widespread awareness among the cognoscenti, the problem of the Nakamoto wallets will not exist on Ergo. It has been fair from the start, and at any point a savvy investor with deep pockets could begin to wade in and develop a prominent place on the rich list.

The issue is whether the model will scale well to secure and process the store of value, over time, as well as maintain its utility, which is programmability. I could go on at length about this flaw in the bitcoin maxi perspective, but suffice to say that if the bitcoin locked up in the Nakamoto wallets started to move it would be game over for the price action on bitcoin for a long time, perhaps a final blow. Certainly it would force any bitcoin maxi to evaluate their options.

And as valuable as Kushti has been, and will continue to be, he is no longer essential to the survival of the protocol, nor is he free to dictate terms and conditions. This makes Ergo flexible in important ways, and inflexible in even more important ways.

I should note that it is best not to love money, even ERG or ADA.

The perils of the system I describe in your post on Agorism are apparent throughout the world, and throughout America. Consider the shrimp farms destroying the mangroves. Or look at what used to be the pleasant suburbs of Detroit. Or check the water quality in Camden, NJ, the home of American Water Works, ffs. I know for a fact that every bank with a window on the Fed has programs dedicted to fixing it, but “Gee, Dad - they don’t seem very effective, do they?” No, Beaver… they don’t.

I love listening to Hoskinson rant about this stuff because that dude was a Republican. Hell, maybe he still is, but I don’t think Mitch McDonalds would approve.

Ain’t no VC megabrain gonna care about the water in Flint or Appalachia. It’s disappointing, but not surprising. As they would say: a fool and their money are soon parted. They keep harvesting fools like PT Barnum and destroying naïve souls. I have no remorse for the solidity devs, because they could pull their heads out of each other’s drawers, and check out a new skill set. It’s the dumpster fire of the crypto traders that hurts to watch.

Love of money gets you rekd.

ETA, prepare yourselves for a Gilligan and Ginger reference at some point.

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The poor water quality blows my mind. So far in my life the only place I’ve seen poor water quality is in a 3rd world country. Pretty disturbing when a civilization doesn’t protect one of the basic necessities of life.

I don’t discuss crypto IRL anymore because the first question is about dogecoin :confused: Despite the technology, it seems the main interest is still on the markets. This is something that gives me more confidence in Ergo. Even as the price tanks nobody is complaining.

CH and Ergo Platform are the only YouTube channels I consistently watch. He seems like a pretty normal guy who just reads a lot and likes to think.

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CH is not a normal guy - He is trying to resurrect a wooly mammoth to play with his bison herd. He’s awesome.

I am loving the crypto winter so far. I was new to the game late last year, and after a lot of listening, I decided weigh in as a miner. Path of least resistance, in my case. The rigs are making a third the revenue they we earning at the peak there, but so to am I getting twice as many Erg. Payoff time in dollars would take longer at this pace, but I am not here for the dollars. If I had just bought a bunch of ERG instead, I would be ahead of where I am now, but not by very much, and I still got the rigs. Mining is awesome, and I can’t believe that Ethereum is throwing it all away.

I don’t have a lot to lose, but based on my understanding, Ergo is the best bet for the bear market. I’m not totally sleeping on Cardano either.

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Fair enough, most people don’t resurrect extinct animals… CH seems in touch with reality, and the ideas he promotes are clear and consistent. Many influential people and organizations present an ideology that doesn’t align with their actions. For example, celebrities who “care about climate change” then use their private jets to accept an award for their “activism.” Or “caring” about sustainable energy, then pushing the least efficient sustainable energy programs (solar panels vs. nuclear). Democrats “caring” about impoverished blacks then setting up programs to enslave blacks via the private prison system (Kamala Harris). Republications being pro states rights (anti big gov.), then exercising extreme authority and promoting the military industrial complex (the GOP)… The list goes on, but after watching most of CH’s videos, I think he is normal in that he isn’t trying to push a hidden agenda. Like talking to a friend, if they tell me something it’s because it’s sincerely what they think.

Glad to hear you’re a miner. If I wasn’t a bohemian/nomad I would like to mine too. I’m probably down 80% or so on my overall investment. I’m not stressed, if I had all of the original investment $$$ I would invest it now in ERG anyways. The question is when should I continue to invest more money? ERG at $2 seems like a steal, but if Buttcoin tanks more then who knows what the low price will be? I don’t imagine the whales will allow ERG to tank past $10 million. So $0.2 would be the absolute lowest… What do you think?

I’m also bullish on Cardano. I held on to mine for the babel fees. Staking ADA is like having a total market ETF in the Cardano ecosystem.

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I have no idea about the price in the short to mid term. I think that the long term price prospects are good for a number of coins and chains.

I don’t have much hope for the Ethereum ecosystem or the long term success of solidity. I also have some concern that one coin will dominate everything at the end of the bear market.

Mining gpus are finally coming down in price, so I have bought a couple more and will probably expand the fleet. Mining is an easy way to DCA. If there are advantageous price fluctuations, I might trade some erg for ada.

But I don’t have a bunch of money to invest, so I haven’t thought much about it. I got kids and they eat like goats, nevermind the cost of education. I am thinking about investing some more focused time on the project tho…

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One coin to dominate them all seems pretty unrealistic?

Bitcoin is that coin right now, it’s definitely realistic.

What does Bitcoin do that Ergo or Cardano do not do?

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