Tezos Betanet Launch | Hacker News Reader

Tezos Betanet Launch

tezosfoundation.ch

70 pointsfrabrunelle17 comments

Tezos is fairly unique in that it had something working before the ICO rather than just a whitepaper. It took them a while to polish it, but all along, they had something working.

Tezos is also atypical in that since the ICO, it has flown extremely under the radar, rather than selling hype. It hasn't had ERC20 token that you can trade in the absence of the network being live.

The Tezos value proposition is "contracts that should be much harder to screw up" which it attempts with formal verification. Along with that, it has proof of stake, and a built in governance system intended to improve on the Bitcoin style of governance.

The more I watch the crypto space, the more I observe that it has developed an inherently misaligned set of incentives. The people who are creating headlines for each new approach are the ones who have already bought in and will benefit most from others being convinced of its value and buying in as well. Just like it took decades for it to be common for personal financial advisors to be fiduciaries, I wonder if there is space for "experts" who commit to not having a stake in any crypto and just commenting on which ones seems to be creating real technological value. I might support a patreon for that. Of course, anonymity on the blockchain would make it hard to "trust" that these "experts" were really unbiased.

P.S. I know crypto is better used to refer to cryptographic technology as a whole, but referring to this area as "cryptocurrency" is insufficient since many are trying to move beyond being currencies, and "blockchain" is insufficient because many are trying alternatives to the basic blockchain introduced by bitcoin.

Like the stock market there will be plenty 'outside analysts' providing buy/sell/hold ratings on crypto and similar to the stock market, it's likely none of these analysts will be unbiased. Just ask Henry Blodget.

Probably easiest to just use a crypto fund fiduciary if you're looking to invest for financial return. "Which tech should I build cool projects in" is a more HN-style problem. The problem with cryptocurrencies is you sort of have to solve both simultaneously.

> are the ones who have already bought in and will benefit most from others being convinced of its value and buying in as well.

Yes. Pyramid scheme. Rather than passively waiting for others to be convinced of it's value, most of the scam coin ICOs actively pay influencers on twitter[1], reddit and telegram and other channels a lot of money to shill / "promote" their sh*t coins...

[1] $105K for McAfee to tweet: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/2/17189880/john-mcafee-bitco...

Related: If you ever wondered how ICOs get a lot of attention even if they suck here are some hints. => https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/8g8opf/if_y...

The cover story in this month's Wired is about Tezos: https://www.wired.com/story/tezos-blockchain-love-story-horr...

Does anyone have a TLDR on this? Their website doesn't make it clear what this technology actually is. My best guess so far is that it's a coin & smart contract platform like Ethereum.

Web site is totally useless.

Testnet instructions are here: http://doc.tzalpha.net/introduction/alphanet.html

Best I can tell: smart contracts like Ethereum, except the protocol has means for amending the protocol itself? So, meta-Ethereum?

This article (Linda Xie) is pretty good: https://medium.com/@linda.xie/a-beginners-guide-to-tezos-c96...

Apparently they also already have proof of stake?

Thank god. Because the one thing Ethereum was missing was more complexity.

At least it uses OCAML and functional code instead of the EVM, for which even the Eth founders themselves can't write secure code.

And a much better language. Though it is hard to do worse than solidity. The consensus algorithm is pretty terrible though, but subject to amendment I suppose.

Smart contract blockchain with 1) on-chain governance and 2) a formally-verifiable language for writing the smart contracts.

People are excited about the launch both because of what it is, and because it already had a lot of people contribute to a fundraiser a year ago.

On-chain governance? It would be pretty entertaining to see if they actually stick to that, and if whoever wins the high-stakes game of Nomic they've created gets to win it for keeps, unlike The DAO.

Of course precedent says they'll just hard fork it the moment the "governance" does something the central developers don't want.

Forking becomes less likely/more costly as a system is widely adopted, and as it is widely decentralized. I agree with you on historical precedent but have more faith in this for a variety of technical and structural reasons. Disclaimer that I’ve known Arthur and Kathleen for a long time (pre-Tezos) and have helped out a little with some infrastructure/security a few times with the project, but that also means I have seen how the sausage is made.

My “article of faith” is that one time someone will get this sufficiently right to facilitate a lot of awesome stuff. Based on what I’ve seen, I think Tezos has a good chance of being “it”. People should definitely do their own research, and it isn’t an all-or-nothing trust thing; trust can be built in a network over time and through use.

It's a an ocaml-flavored coin promising to solve "governance" problems. It has naturally suffered a lot of governance drama related to colorful personalities involved.

Due to sudden KYC requirements there is already a fork called "Tezos libre"

Tezos Libre was announced long before the KYC requirement occured. It is a scam, based on an ethereum token. They have not even succeeded in finding the github "fork" button for Tezos yet. There is no there, there except a scammer trying to get paid.

It was only after the KYC announcement that TzLibre changed tack to claim it's purpose was anti KYC.

From the website:

> The Tezos Foundation’s primary focus is the promotion and development of the Tezos protocol and related technologies, as well as the promotion and support of applications using the Tezos protocol.

Should be clear now, right? ;)

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