Announcing a16z crypto research
a16z.com
a16z.com
That's totally what happened. We are in a renaissance of artistry, of artists creating meaningful art out of conviction, and making a living.
"innovation in the space is only accelerating"
They mispelled infinite exploitation of people who are greedy or desperate to believe in something. A common mistake. Pushing ticking timebombs on people as investment and fanning the hype machine, if not outright manipulating the markets can be called innovation, but innovation should involve societal gain too.
Let me share an example of actual innovation. Imagine if you will a database technology that allows encrypted data to be searched and the server to be untrusted, not having the ability to compromise the data regardless of how curious or malicious the server is. This is a very complicated problem, but it would allow for companies with services like Facebook to not have access to your data, unless you shared it, while still being able to operate the service. You would still have to trust third parties or the government to store your encryption keys, and perhaps to ensure the freshness of your data, there is no such thing as zero trust, but we wouldn't have to trust as many parties. We could create a trust infrastructure every new service can benefit from.
This kind of technology would compromise the business model of many companies, but isn't it the goal of Web 3.0 to give ordinary people more control over their lives, their data? I suspect the actual goal of it is to create a use for cryptocurrencies, or maybe find another avenue for growth and exploitation. Don't get me wrong, make as much money as you can, but do something useful. Do something people actually want or need. Don't just wantonly and reclessly exploit them. Create some damn value, something your mama would be proud of.
People created excellent UIs in the "shrink wrap" software era before people even had network connections. In fact, many would argue that some of these UIs were simpler and cleaner and overall better.
Oh wait... if by optimize a service you mean optimize it for engagement (addiction, triggering, controversy) then I agree.
I can imagine a lot of interfaces for sites like that which do not require personalized feedback at all. In fact, a rich search feature allowing me to say what I want to find would usually be preferable to an opaque recommendation engine designed to steer me toward content the site wants me to visit.
There is disagreement in the cryptography community about the extent to which this is actually possible. I've seen a few proofs that the obvious "magic" version of this where you can directly but blindly search is impossible because you could use search criteria to reconstruct the content, but that only rules out the most obvious implementation strategies. There's a lot of research going on with this kind of thing in the cryptographic community that involves leveraging zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and so on. Nothing practical enough to make anything like a blind SQL database though.
In any case I was arguing against the claim that this would preclude good UI/UX design if it were in fact possible.
When I search YouTube I’m seldom looking for all videos made on August 29th. I might instead be looking for videos of a black cat. Or videos containing music with certain lyrics that I search for. This is what I thought you meant by rich search. I contend it’s unlikely you can design a privacy respecting service that can also extract the features necessary to train a search model.
But running a service like Youtube that keeps Google in the dark about what you are watching is not possible. It's not even that content creators would have to upload their content padded and encrypted, and privately share the content with their audiences, but the entire audience would need to privately aquire the content each time. A statistically or computationally secure solution like read-only ORAM is out of question at that scale, well any scale that's larger than a few gigabytes. Anything with a constant overhead would only amount to I downloaded five videos, guess what video did I end up watching? And Google would have a one in five chance to tell, if the requests are random, but over time they could still piece you together since your privacy equals to watching five videos at a time, revisiting videos, visiting popular ones, visiting certain ones at a certain time in a certain order. The client could throw in a few fake requests, but such constant effort would still be defeated.
We're at a place in some circles where cryptocurrency projects and any subjective value they may provide is preemptively dismissed with prejudice. Ultimately the customer decides what he values. As tech types it is too easy to sit back and claim, "Oh these consumers don't know what they want". Perhaps that is true. Perhaps what we find useful or interesting isn't what interests consumers. If we really know what will satisfy them, then we should provide it.
Knee-jerk condemnations are a bit easier.
They've done a great deal of harm in that period, so I can't see even the current level of mild negative sentiment as sustainable.
If something with that utility is so lowly valued, then imagine the true intrinsic value of BTC!
Slapping a decentralized sticker on and having a cryptocurrency apparently worked out for them. This is how you successfully differentiate a product.
There may be subjective value, but there is also fraud and exploitation. Calling it out is not wrong. I would be very interested in a16z honestly writing about the actual problems in this industry, how are they combatting them, but hype is the only language they know. They pretend that NFTs or games with token economies are utopias, because an utopia is easy to sell. They are very far from an utopia, in fact a lot of nasty things are going on with them.
Social media as mentioned above is another good example. I don't personally see the value in something like FB, but I don't generalize or condemn social media broadly. If others want to realize value there, fine. There are also groups calling out the perceived "evils" of FB, Instagram and others. They'll go as far as blaming teen suicide on social media.
One person's utopia is another's hell.
Imagine looking at FB's market valuation and claiming, "There's no real value as I define it, therefore FB is worthless!". Would love to see what this person builds and how the market reacts to their personal values. Innovation, actions, speak so much louder than some of HN's condemnations.
(1) Gambling (including "investing" in speculative non-corporeal assets)
(2) Scams (this includes misattributed art)
(3) Obvious mediocre junk created to cash in on a fad
I'm sure you can dig and find a couple of examples. The problem is that you have to dig. BBSes, the Internet, and the WWW protocol were instantly useful. One did not have to dig at all to find dozens to hundreds of legitimate use cases. We are in year 14 of cryptocurrency and you have to dig to find anything that is not a scam or crap.
For example here is the flagship of the NFT craze:
It speaks for itself.
But there must be dozens of other approaches to doing cryptocurrencies in a sane and safe manner. E.g., in all this crazy buzz, has anyone in this space tried to do an updated version of digicash? That was a digital payment system created by one of the grandfathers of modern crypto. I've never heard a counterargument to its fundamentals-- unlike Bitcoin, you got your cashlike properties of anonymity wrt the issuing back through the use of blinded signatures. And I'm pretty sure it could also scale much better than blockchain-based stuff. It just pre-dated ecommerce so it didn't have a market.
There must be dozens of other non-blockchain approaches that also route around all the scaling problems of trying to do a blockchain or decentralized approach.
I mean, even in the realm of anonymous messaging researchers like Len Sassman came up with remailers that could make use of some number of centralized servers without relying on them to play nice for the anonymity properties. Hell, Moxie even went full centralized and still gets what I think a lot of commenters on HN would have to admit are decent privacy properties. Or, at least better privacy options than you'd get with doing transactions through Bitcoin.
Are there equivalent non-blockchain, non-decentralization-zealotry cryptocurrency experiments going on right now in this same space? If so, I'd love to know about them.
If not, then it sure does look like a bunch of people either copy/pasted Bitcoin's hashcash hack or put an experimental stop-gap in there to surf atop this ocean of cash that seems to only chase this incredibly small niche.
This allows larger numbers of disparate parties to coordinate on them for financial and social interaction. I would not rely heavily on a token distributed on a centralized digicash like system but I would rely on a token my company issues on Ethereum, because I know any one receiving the tokens would still be able to access them years from now and that the infrastructure of compatible software, both client-side and blockchain-based, will only grow over time.
No, this is extremely wrong. I would encourage you to look into the rather large graveyard of cryptocurrencies that collapsed and are now worthless. A digital cash platform will shut down when it's not profitable and nobody wants to use it anymore, the exact same thing is true of any cryptocurrency.
It also seems really bad to me that this view is becoming more common, that's it's actually a good thing that BTC and ETH are getting "too big to fail" despite the flaws in them being relatively well known at this point. It's like we've come full circle...
None of those are major cryptocurrencies, and the blockchains of many of those which are now effectively worthless continue to exist in a handful of nodes around the world, showing the resilience of this enterprise structure.
>>A digital cash platform will shut down when it's not profitable and nobody wants to use it anymore, the exact same thing is true of any cryptocurrency.
No, a blockchain is inherently far more widely distributed in its infrastructure providers and datastores, and is therefore far less likely to disappear as a trusted database for shared operations like a token ledger.
>>that's it's actually a good thing that BTC and ETH are getting "too big to fail"
In this case they are too big to fail on their own, not too big for society to allow them to fail, which is an entirely different concept, and only superficially similar. It is a good thing for the world at large when a shared ledger becomes increasingly robust to failure due to its own structure becoming more resilient. This makes for a more reliable platform for financial and social interaction.
Sure, but this is circular logic. They're not major anymore because they're dead.
>and the blockchains of many of those which are now effectively worthless continue to exist in a handful of nodes around the world, showing the resilience of this enterprise structure.
Yeah and I still keep copies of old Word 95 documents around, so if we're going by only "time spent existing" then the data structure used in Word 95 documents is much better and more resilient than blockchains. Of course that's a silly way to look at things.
>a blockchain is inherently far more widely distributed in its infrastructure providers and datastores
This is not even remotely close to being true. Nothing about blockchains makes them inherently more distributed, you can very easily deploy a blockchain on only one machine and keep it that way. The communities around them might be more distributed but that's a different discussion that isn't really related to blockchains.
>In this case they are too big to fail on their own, not too big for society to allow them to fail
I'm sorry I don't understand what the difference is. The definition of success here is "society sees it as useful" so the mode of failure is the same either way.
>It is a good thing for the world at large when a shared ledger becomes increasingly robust to failure due to its own structure becoming more resilient. This makes for a more reliable platform for financial and social interaction.
Sure, I can agree with that, but these statements have nothing to do with blockchains or cryptocurrency at all. You could say the same thing about a digital cash becoming more robust.
I am stretching the truth a little bit here and it's more like "allows encrypted data/messages to be bidirectionally sent and exchanged two parties while the server is untrusted" because neither of these protocols allow for search. However, they /do/ allow for fully anonymous transactions + data storage, upon which you could build the rest of your social networks on top of.
So IMO the actual pace of technological innovation in crypto is quite strong. I'm not such a big fan of the NFT space, but DeFi and the truly anonymous coins are extremely interesting to me.
ZK-tech, while super cool, is not super related IMO, but it is seem strange that the GP doesn't seem to consider it a worthwhile side effect of cryptocurrency hype.
The difference is that those databases are much more efficient than blockchain technologies. The whole proof of work (voting power depends on computational effort) song and dance is unnecessary for a database. Even for a distributed database you only need a Byzantine agreement such as Paxos, which can only tolerate a certain number of faulty or malicious nodes. This would not work for cryptocurrencies, they need to tolerate arbitary number of such nodes (also known as a Sybil attack) to avoid the double spending problem. Cryptocurrency transactions are not I-confluent (invariant confluent), but certain database transactions are and they don't require consensus at all, so there are specialized databases that can tolerate arbitrary number of faulty or malicious nodes without Sybil countermeasures.
The problem with crypto is that a solution to a specific problem (eliminating the double spending problem trustlessly) can't be applied to every problem. There are trade-offs involved. Solving the double spending problem will let you have cryptocurrencies, but will lock you out of efficiently solving a lot of other problems.
long past its breaking point
From the HN guidelines:
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I see that you want to scold and give instructions to strangers
In the meantime, I also don't discuss medicine with antivaxxers, or geology with flat earthers
I have no interest in explaining to you that your lambo moon buddies are wrong, that blockchains aren't databases, that montero doesn't search encrypted data, that these things legitimately do exist, etc
It's just an opportunity for you to dutifully recite something that you saw someone else say, then pretend shows you to be technically sophisticated
I don't care about horse apple paste people telling me that I'm not being constructive when I vocally doubt their unevidenced claims
Nobody cares when you demand that other people prove you wrong. Religious people do that all day every day.
There's a reason religion never proves itself right.
I don't need to prove my doubt of you. Science is rooted in doubt.
In particular, you'd do well to look at these three guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Your comments are snarky, dismissive, shallow and presume bad faith. Rather than engage with curiosity and thoughtfulness, you put words that were never said into the mouths of others, so you ultimately are not adding anything to the conversation. Maybe this is the standard of discourse on Twitter or Reddit, but it doesn't rise to HN's level of discourse.
I'm not going to make a value judgment one way or another here, but I'll just say this -- if you can't explain what you really think without belittling others, people won't think it's because you're smarter than them. They will think it's because you have nothing to say (or you're too lazy to put in the effort into saying something) and you're afraid of that being made obvious.
The entire answer is in that text.
I'm not interested in your list of judgments or your following statement that you won't be making a judgment. I'm not interested in you telling me that you think I belong on Twitter, or your attempt to rely on having been here six years as being an old timer.
You ignored everything I said and we both know why.
Don't waste your time making another set of personal attacks.
This is irony right? Because a guy made some money selling ape drawings there's now a renaissance?
you needed to ask?
dualitytech.com | cosmian.com | inpher.io | enveil.com | apheris.com | capeprivacy.com
I was hoping a16z had invested in one of these companies working on privacy-enhancing technologies (PET)... but no. May be, the tech is not quite there yet, or a16z doesn't yet have an "investment thesis" for it.
> This kind of technology would compromise the business model of many companies, but isn't it the goal of Web 3.0 to give ordinary people more control over their lives, their data?
A counter point to this is web3 institutions like the Algorand Foundation which employ some of the best cryptographers and security researchers who have gone on to make non-trivial contributions in PET and MPC (multi-party computation) fields.
I assume this is sarcastic, but to be fair, generative and computer art really is thriving and getting more recognition than it ever has in the past, in part because of recent NFT boom.
[1] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/vera-molnar-venice-biennal...
[2] https://www.sothebys.com/en/digital-catalogues/natively-digi...
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/internet-computer
Any crypto "research" group they're doing is to whitewash all of the shady projects they're profiting from.
It's very strange to me that they don't seem to care about it, I thought VC is all about reputation, image and connections. If their LPs think they're a fraud how can they ever raise another fund ever again?
Has anyone else noticed that Andreessen on twitter has really gone a different direction? I thought his commentary was normally pretty buttoned up and interesting but it seems almost strictly inflammatory these days. Maybe he was like this all along and I never noticed. Still like hearing him talk though - even if I don't agree with everything he says.
If we continue the analogy, crypto fans usually respond by asserting that the problem will be solved any day now by making the platter spin faster and having 30 new defrost modes, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a souped up microwave.
It's almost like a vertical integration to be able to control the whole value chain of BS instead of having to find legit sources to cite. Somehow this has shades of Enron or Theranos, where a non-specialist's misconception of an idea results in a gigantic scam.
In some ways, at least those people are mostly just genuinely ignorant. The folks like the faculty they have lined up presumably know better, but are still going along with it.
Do you have any concrete evidence to support the claim, that they (a16z) have failed to pulled out and are in a significant loss on their crypto investments?
Otherwise this is yet another baseless and unfounded assumption which can be simply dismissed entirely.
My point is that since they're drinking their own kool-aid, they're not securing the bag / leaving the poker table right now, a time I believe is close to peak crypto bubble (although the bubble could also plausibly last another 5 years and inflate another 5x). They're Leeroy Jenkinsing another $3.5B right now [1] which I think they're at high risk of losing and tanking the IRR of the combined funds.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664995
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/20/andreessen-horo...
The web3 bullshit that they are spreading as mentioned in your article is evidence that they are pumping their own bags and continuing to hype the web3 narrative with their nonsense. But it isn't evidence that they are 'not securing the bag' and just only sitting there in the bubble, nor does it show that they are at a significant loss. They aren't that silly enough to just sit around, hold and not secure the bag in their investments.
They (a16z) made it so that in their own crypto investments, they can't lose unless in rare circumstances, even in the event of a hack.
They will keep doing it until stricter regulations prevent them from doing so. Such as working extremely closely with multiple exchanges to simultaneously list the tokens they've invested in and use them to dump on retail as exit liquidity. [0][1]
Even if they do get caught, they can pay the SEC a small fine which is nothing more than a slap on the wrist to them from their gains. They (a16z) make money and the SEC makes money.
That is why they still win and rarely lose. But retail in almost every case always loses.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012587
[1] https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/07/221261...
https://news.bitcoin.com/moonbirds-nft-sales-skyrocket-captu...
It's just not the same NFTs from 1-2 years ago that are doing high sales volume. Interest rotates around. Just look at the sales volumes overall.
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...
I'm not sure which part of the article you rely on to assert that "the activity is overstated", but it claims:
> With blockchain analysis, however, we can track NFT wash trading by analyzing sales of NFTs to addresses that were self-financed, meaning they were funded either by the selling address or by the address that initially funded the selling address.
Any wash sale not doing exactly that will be missed. The article itself is titled "Chainalysis Detects Significant Wash Trading and Some NFT Money Laundering" which does not bode well, on top of the arguments made in the HN comment I linked.
Come on man, this kind of comment doesn't add value to the discussion at all. You can do better than this.
Working without a trusted central authority and permissioning is extraordinarily expensive and wasteful.
Think about it, the actual useful compute power of Bitcoin (or Ethereum) is about what one average computer can do. But because of massive duplication (can't trust the other one) plus PoW, you need around 100,000,000 times the compute power.
The real question then is when or under what circumstances it is worth it, and that question is not being asked enough.
y'all some junior koch brothers
This is either a really bad misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works or it’s just a blatant lie. The parameters of the Bitcoin mining algorithm can be adjusted if the mining community chooses to. There is nothing about the technology that mandates “how that code will behave in the future”.
Say, 95% of hash power (so, the top 5-10 of mining pools) change their validation logic, but, yay, none of the non-mining nodes (and the good 5% miners) accept the change. Then we effectively have a hard fork, no?
The bad miners can trivially add more nodes, which will accept the change.
The good nodes won't. Good miners keep mining. But suppose the bad miners go rogue just after a difficulty adjustment. So, then the good nodes (with 5% hash power) can emit a block around only every 3 hours (200 minutes), and it will take around 2x20=40 weeks to adjust the difficulty (unless, of course... they conspire to change that. Why not?).
The bad miners, meanwhile, can keep mining with their rogue version, and occasionally divert a small fraction of their mining power to mess with the good nodes (double spend, make a "longer chain" with no transactions inside, or whatever).
The defence I see against that scenario is not the code or the crypto or the nodes, but the fact that they'd probably kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Or maybe not: maybe both chains together are more valuable than the old one alone! Maybe they should give it a try.
It puts the tamperproof feature to work, and there are some measures in place for voting that help ensure the data being placed on the blockchain is actually authentic.
Maybe the press too
EDIT: would love to hear opposing downvoting views. our votes are already digital and tamperable
- Many people vote on paper with hand counting, which is of course not digital. - Many people vote on paper with machine counting, which is straightforwardly auditable. - Many people vote on Direct Recording Electronic (touchscreen) machines. Some of these have paper trails which can be audited and some do not.
Some background here on conventional voting systems: https://educatedguesswork.org/tags/voting/
There has been quite a bit of work on cryptographic voting, but the blockchain feature doesn't really help that much, because the votes are signed and there is a public record of who voted and who did not. The complicated piece is ensuring the votes haven't been tampered with while keeping them secret, but again, the blockchain doesn't help here. The deployment problems around cryptographic voting are largely about endpoint security and user comprehension of what's happening.
So instead of making them less tamperable you instead want to make it seamless to buy and sell votes as well as less private?
Blockchains solve precisely zero of the hard problems in voting, and instead add tons of problems.
Cryptography for voting? Absolutely-- sure. There is plenty that cryptography has to offer, but not the blockchain part. Bitcoin is useful, but blockchain voting is a receipt for corruption.
the blockchain would provide a tamper-proof record of each vote. that is an improvement.
i don't understand what benefits hashing would add.
If you just want to make sure votes aren't being discarded there are thousands of ways to accomplish that, including, e.g. sending receipts to the candidates or their parties themselves.
Adding a public blockchain to it doesn't solve any issue that isn't solved with simpler and safer mechanisms, it's the absolute worst of cargo-cult engineering.