So many of the smartest people in the world work in the areas of getting people to click on ads, mining personal information, finance and crypto. Areas that at best have no social value. It is quite depressing.
What we want is to basically transfer work/resource tokens and make it resistant against depreciation. Lets add a simplistic example I help someone build a house and receive a fair token for that work. When I need to build a house 20 years later I pass that token, it retains the value such that someone accepts it to do the work I did 20 years prior. Because we’re mentally stuck into an outdated economic model that served ok prior to the digital age our imaginations aren’t creative enough move in the right direction. My thinking is that a direction will emerge, let’s hope it’s as far away from the possibility you talk about.
Yes, I think you have the right idea. This is a credit based system, which, I think is fairer because anyone can issue credit denominated in some numeraire and it holds its value over time as long as the issuer can be trusted to “redeem” the credit. The issue with this system is that bootstrapping it is difficult and it’s quite complicated because everyone now needs to become a credit risk/reputation expert!
PeakD.com
Or a digital currency with the privacy and fungibility of cash.
GetMonero.org
Or an ad free streaming platform.
Odysee.com
It's ostensibly a BTC podcast, but it's _really_ about much more including second tier networks, altcoin tech, and individual autonomy.
Otherwise, getting involved in the code itself does seem to be the only avenue I've found for real learning.
There's an O'Reilly book that has you build a blockchain from scratch if you're interested.
I'd welcome other suggestions.
Oh, also Tezos has most of Ethereum's features, but is already Proof of Stake.
> Ethereum could be extremely valuable but that its value is currently hurt by the speculation on Ether making transactions far too costly
FYI the price of ETH does not affect the transaction costs. The fee market is independent. There's solutions to this in place and more being worked on though. The 3 biggest contributors will be EIP 1559 which is meant to level out the fees and make them more predictable, L2 rollups which scale through sidechains that have the each of their blocks confirmed on Ethereum's L1 with proofs, and sharding of L1. Ethereum is currently in a growing pains phase as these L2 options gain more traction/adoption, UX for them improves, and all activity migrates there. The end goal is for a majority of interaction to occur on L2 with L1 being used mainly for a settlement layer.
Incidentally, if you're looking to keep up with Ethereum in particular, the newsletter Week In Ethereum News is an excellent resource. It's a links-with-descriptve-blurbs kind of thing. It's still a bit of a firehose if you're catching up on the space, but just pick a few items that sound interesting every week. https://weekinethereum.substack.com/
Check out Bankless and The Daily Gwei.
Nowadays I usually go to /r/cryptocurrency/new for the firehose. I do not aim to read everything, just check in and take some notes. What tends to happen on that subreddit is that some really great posts get made but never hit frontpage because they're crowded out by useless memetic content. But you can take individual great posts and turn those into leads by doing some additional legwork. I don't usually talk to those users(I do not want to read comment thread replies and will completely ignore my Reddit inbox, instead I will monitor the thread if it interests me) but I will sometimes browse their post history.
Lots of grand ideas that went nowhere because they are entirely unrealistic and divorced from reality.