Ask HN: Where are secular source of crypto space knowledge? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where are secular source of crypto space knowledge?

29 pointsExistenceblinks22 comments

As history record shows that a bunch of religions have been survived for thousand years, a lot of church and temple, along with modern technology and government of secular and non-secular states.

So, I am adjusting my attitude to live with cryptocurrency stuff because I think it is not going anywhere and could still exist for my lifespan. Cryptocurrency/blockchain knowledge like religions, there are good concept applicable and useful in life, there are also tons of bullshit, scam, even violence. I would like to collect sources of knowledge that is not related to any cult non-sense.

Knowledge in crypto/blockchain stuff I would like to know, for example, what's top 5 coins, overall promising regarding transaction rate, fee, market cap, suitable for application (e.g. dapp), technical and philosophical limitation. I have pretty good exploring skills, read a lot of data, but when it comes to knowledge around cult, it takes a lot of energy to filter out greed based statement.

Where are secular sources of crypto space knowledge?

Thanks.

Thats an interesting way of looking at things.

Best place would be to look at what top uni research labs are publishing. Usually when academics get curious about something they start labs dedicated to in depth study. Eg: https://dci.mit.edu/

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/research/publications/Pages/defa...

Look outside the US too.

Its to early to find good sources though imho, given the ever dangling financial incentives.

And as you rightly point out, there is a mindless buffoon class who have discovered showing raging growth (by handing out free stuff to unsophistacted people) will get you more funding (to buy more growth, to get more funding...). This cycle is happening at high speed these days which makes fixing issues that require time extremely hard. Thats a big weakness of anything receiving hype these days.

Bitcoin might have some resemblance and overlap with emergence of religion but it doesnt really satisfy the Needs that religion does. As in there are Needs and Issues people have that finance wont solve. For example, go to a Cancer Hospital anywhere in the world and watch a doc tell parents their kid is not going to survive another month. There are so many similar situations people get thrown into. Many of whom have no great education or access to mental health care. Therefore Religion has survived inspite of all the cults, superstition, wars and death it has produced.

Learn basics of bitcoin, then advance to basics of lightning network, if you get bored with lightning learn basics of EVM (Ethereum virtual machine)

After you are comfortable with these 3, you are golden. Along the way you will also learn to differentiate between scam products and what could be promising

I'd say if you are interested in building things then skip Bitcoin entirely and go straight to EVM. UTXOs are counterintuitive, and architecturally lighting network has more in common with BGP than other blockchain networks.

But the best usecases that are not scam are with lightning

The Romans thought christians were crazy for being monotheists and tried to suppress them for decades. Eventually that religion took over most of the world for centuries.

Top 5 coins is easy. You can look at market cap or my list here. bitcoin ethereum monero .........

Look into ENS, IPFS, 'layer 2' chains, bip32, etc.

The core thing to keep in mind when thinking about cryptocurrency is that it is software. 2010 bitcoin is very different from 2021 bitcoin. There is a shitload of funding in the space and a lot of progress is being made. Just because 'bitcoin is slow' or 'bitcoin uses all the energy' today does not mean it will in 5 years.

I’m not sure what point you mean to make about Christianity. Judaism is also monotheistic, and predates both Christianity and the Romans. The Romans did not think Jews were crazy. Rome didn’t try to suppress Christians because of their belief in one god. They tried to suppress Christians because of violence and not respecting the state religion.

depends on which sect of christians you are talking about. after nero burning christians as candles (googld roman candles), it caused an uproar, many converted to christianity out of spite to nero burning down rome

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gl...

This always brings back memories of Nero Burning ROM

Never appreciated the joke in the software's name before though LOL

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Burning_ROM

> secular sources of crypto space knowledge

fwiw: https://github.com/DOACC documented at https://doacc.github.io/

An historical snapshot (in RDF) of the metadata of ~3500 altcoins from mid-2014 to early 2017 when the recording effort was abandoned.

First, read those same religious sources to see the stories about greed and pride. Know that there are very large market forces distorting your picture of reality. Read up on Tether, and how it is distorting reality as well.

There are a lot of funds flowing through these systems that would otherwise go through other channels. This just happens to be a good way to route around limits on the movement of capital at the moment.

Cryptocurrency is not money, nor is it an investment. It's a bet that the status quo will be maintained long enough for you to withdraw your funds later at a smaller loss than inflation, and a possible speculative gain.

There are a lot of people who mined a few bitcoin back in the day, and lucked out on the speculation, so they all have positive stories to tell, and cautionary tales of selling too soon, not being careful enough, etc.

Consider cryptocurrency to be the newest version of Beanie Babies, and act accordingly.

>Consider cryptocurrency to be the newest version of Beanie Babies, and act accordingly.

I find it hilarious that people can seriously equate a 2.6 trillion dollar industry with Beanie Babies. Beanie Babies did not allow for the creation of a decentralized financial network.

> so they all have positive stories to tell, and cautionary tales of selling too soon, not being careful enough, etc.

Much like organized religion, constructive criticism of crypto is rarely addressed by its followers. They are much more likely to accuse apostates of FUD, and point to dogma like 'code is law', seemingly unaware of flaws in code that make hacks common.

And don't get me started on the pleas to 'keep the faith' among the congregation anytime there's a price shock to a specific coin.

Study classic networking and distributed computing. There's nothing really novel about most cryptocurrencies from a CS perspective. The ones that aren't scams are all built on classical consensus algorithms and p2p application programming concepts. A few even offer novel albeit incremental contributions to the state of the art.

Source: have PhD in CS in wide-area distributed computing

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You should check it as it is what you are looking for in the long term

https://experty.io/

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEMXAbCVnmY5oroBlDDIZMZWz...

it's in the technical details. if you read the protocols whitepapers RFCs etc. these are the bible of each crypto.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/

tl;dr it’s a cult based on fantasy and misconceptions and greed, rather than a cult based on superstition and power.

nah this guy sucks, he has a career as a contrarian crypto critic and seems fundamentally okay with ignoring any of the positive developments in crypto technology and more than willing to falsify or be deliberately obtuse in his articles to make crypto look bad which gives him both attention and profit. and your tldr is untruthful.

I can’t formulate a response to such a cogent and thoughtful reply.

actually dont think I'll need a response from you unless its about working from an ipad full time or other thought provoking insights.

You could list some of those positive developments. Or describe what you consider false, obtuse, or untruthful in David Gerard’s books and articles, or in my summary. Or you can just wave it away with ad hominem I suppose.

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