The End of My Childhood
vitalik.eth.limo
vitalik.eth.limo
This was kind of a revelation to me a long time ago. When you're 20, you're a totally different person than when you're 10. When you're 30, different than 20. Just like the linked article suggests, you really tend to underestimate how much you're going to change in the future. At 10, you can't really consider how you're going to be when you're 20.
I may be more skilled, better informed, and care a great deal about people who didn’t exist back then, but I think my basic personality is shockingly close to 10 year old me.
The blog uses decentralized storage (IPFS) and uses a decentralized ENS domain (vitalik.eth).
If you use a web3 browser like brave browser vitalik.eth resolves natively in the browser without the need to use the ENS+IPFS (eth.limo) gateway.
I’m not sure how you could read this post and conclude that “the cool thing” about it is that it is decentralized.
By far, the coolest thing about Vitalik’s blog is his writing, in its thoughtfulness and humility.
That it’s decentralized speaks to his commitment to his beliefs.
- For IPFS see the other current thread on HN [1]
- For ENS I can say that it was and it is ridiculous. My company was relatively well known in the decentralized space when the ENS launched and obviously someone registered our name before us. This is not a support of the current DNS system but the "decentralized" nature didn't add any decentralized feature (e.g. DAOs) that enable you to protect your brand. It was decentralized as a bad anarchy is. This can be easily check on Reddit discussions about the issues I pointed. For example [2] and [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208673
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5zmg76/serious_co...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5z4iiw/ama_we_are...
Neiman is a PhD in mathematics and idealist. The solution he wants goes beyond just hosting a decentralized blog.
As far as ENS, I’m a fan. Though it’s too bad someone registered your well known business name you can always import your DNS into the ENS protocol (ENS is not the .eth extension, rather .eth is the native ENS blockchain extension but is reverse compatible with DNS).
Going back to neiman, for a time he was working on his own naming protocol named Woolball. Might be a fun read for you: https://neiman.eth.limo/2022-10-25/Woolball_a_name_system_wi...
BTW, I come out with the paper "Is IPFS Ready for Decentralized Video Streaming?" [3] that could be an interesting read.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ipfs+performance&hl=en&...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=ipfs+performance+site%3Aredd...
What a bizarre thing to say.
Neiman is a friend and inspiration. I specifically said I’m lucky to know him personally.
Calling him an idealist isn’t an attack, it’s admirable.
IPFS is fine for hosting blogs and static websites, I have 50 IPFS websites using a pinning service neiman cofounded. However, his blog post speaks for itself and his considerations are greater than whether IPFS/IPNS can host a blog.
Nice work on your paper.
If you make your technical decisions based on, as far as I can tell from Wikipedia, 1 minor political disagreement with the project lead then you'll be as limited as Stallman when it comes to using a computer. That is an extreme position.
What all this small resentful and passive aggressive people did against Brendan was the only real shame on this history.
I fail to see the relevance here.
Seems like he was forced out of Mozilla by a bunch of children who can't handle the fact that people have different opinions and perspectives. Even though I disagree with him on this particular issue, he was not the one acting wildly unprofessionally here. A brief look at his resume and the relative success of Brave as a company suggests he's perfectly qualified at his job.
To be clear, I'm not some Brave fanboy. I don't use Brave because it doesn't offer me anything I need that Firefox doesn't.
Brendan Eich's personal views have nothing to do with it.
> Now, five years later, I finally realized that (i) I had been complicit in legitimizing a genocidal dictator, and (ii) within the crypto space too, I no longer had the luxury of sitting back and letting mystical "other people" run the show.
Congrats on congratulating yourself on being the Benevolent dictator (in contrast with presumably genocidal dictator) and inventor of your own decentralised financial institution that enabled everything imaginable around money schemes, not matter how average and worst it is compared to regulated traditional banking. How much is you worth by the way ?
> I was getting excited about every new cryptography protocol, and economics too seemed to me to be part of that broader worldview: it's the mathematical tool for understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world.
No, it isn't. This kind of hubris is what hides what Crypto is, which is a game of greater fools and nothing more.
At this point it is no longer reasonable to just claim it is a greater fools game without an argument for why. The evidence right now seems to put it in a similar category to gold in that people generally don't like that it has value, but nonetheless value is present.
I also draw people's attention to the parallel with something like a RAID array - it is possible to make robust systems out of unreliable parts. The abundance of scammy and scummy operators in the crypto space is quite consistent with the similar prevalence in traditional finance. The system is robust regardless.
1. People see it as a store of value
2. It has some useful physical properties
3. People use it as a decoration
Possibly there are other reasons as well, but those are the ones that come immediately to mind. As far as I can tell, Bitcoin only shares attribute #1. It doesn’t have intrinsic properties that make it useful into larger systems (though perhaps we just haven’t found the right systems yet?), and people don’t feel it’s intrinsically valuable. Not to completely bash Bitcoin though — if enough people find it valuable it can become a useful way to exchange value. Right now it’s just pretty bad at that.
* Can only pull new bitcoin into existence by paying a hefty market-determined price.
* Can transfer them iff you know a certain secret.
* Can verify that a certain number of bitcoin are linked to a specific secret.
* Can technically transfer bitcoin without approval from a legally blessed 3rd party
There is no asset outside of crypto with those properties. Turns out that combination is worth, so far, billions. Probably more as it settles in and people get used to the idea. Will Bitcoin last forever like gold? No. Will it last long enough? Looks like it. Is crypto valuable? Judgement is in, market says yes.
It already is a useful way to exchange value, people do it all the time.
People love to say this, but frankly it is so unrealistic as to border on untrue. It’s a lot to remember. And you can’t transact with “your head” alone, you still need to interface with a computer of sorts; in the event you’re fleeing it’s probably not so easy to purchase a hardware wallet or download the TB-scale blockchain.
12 words is enough. For example: witch collapse practice feed shame open despair creek road again ice least. If you can make a story that incorporates those words, it's even easier to remember.
> you still need to interface with a computer of sorts
You flee a nasty place towards a nice place. Nice places have computers and internet.
Don't most people who invest in gold use ETCs/ETFs, certificates etc.?
I don't think gold trading is significantly far off instantaneous, at this point, and it's probably easier to cash out.
The underlying model is corrupt and nakedly stupid.
Money is a form of mind control. You use money to get people, groups, institutions, to do what they normally wouldn't. Economics is the study of manipulating that power.
Cryptocurrencies would then be, or was supposed to be, about radically resetting economic priorities, in part by washing away the old incentives (by cutting the institutions that perpetuated them out of the money->behavior loop). It actually did manage this, to a limited and chagrin-inducing extent: 2-3 years ago, you could have convinced someone to pony up 2 year's worth of the average American's income for a picture of a cartoon monkey. Even today, people are paying "money" for digital art that they never would have a decade ago. The potential to have people value things differently because the means underlying that valuation had changed was there.
The issue, to my eye, is that the traditional financial "megaliths" (as he put it) sunk their claws in, with people on the inside ready to sell out the space to become filthy rich (only to be betrayed, both by their own hubris and the incumbent power structures). This is where your "game of greater fools" comes into play, as well as the oft-noted notion that Capitalism subsumes and commodifies everything it can.
Hello! Your friendly neighborhood economist here. Economics is the study of resource allocation under scarcity.
In your comment, I think you actually mean Game Theory and Mechanism Design, which are about assessing strategic behavior (Game Theory) and about creating mechanisms that align with strategic behavior to result in preferred outcomes (Mechanism Design, sort of the opposite approach to Game Theory).
Alternatively, based on your comment here:
> The potential to have people value things differently because the means underlying that valuation had changed was there.
you might find your thoughts more appropriately align to sociology and social psychology than economics, as economics doesn't care where your valuation or preferences come from--just that you have them.
Up, up, and away!
>you might find your thoughts more appropriately align to sociology and social psychology than economics
Since economics is an emergent property of agents interacting with other agents and their environment, I'm failing to see how I'm misaligned with any of the three. I've heard economics described as "sociology with a veneer of statistics", which is something I can't say I'm unconvinced by. I respect your status as a relative expert, and also as someone close enough to the subject to have a conflict of interest in characterizing it fairly.
As an economist, would you be able to explain (because I truely do not understand) why "the study of resource allocation under scarcity" is more important than (and/or prevents) meaningful action on climate change?
For my case, it is quite simple -- people have different preferences and switching costs! I chose economics as a field of profession because I felt it explained human behavior much better than anything I'd come across in my life at the ripe old age of 21. Had I started my studies less than two decades ago, I would have invested more in physical sciences (especially hydrological saline exchange and improving soil quality through mycology, both fascinating problems some of my close friends study). This said, my data science company was founded two years ago to focus on impact problems in health, technology, and geopolitics, all of which are becoming more and more impacted by the effects of anthropogenic climate change in addition to just out and out pollution and bad policy effects.
But I think your first question is less why I personally studied computational economics and industrial organization, and more why economics exists when humanity may be facing a global extinction at worst and a loss of living standard at best. And the answer is: economics can be used to help with mitigation (and economists have been calling for effectual policy to address climate change for _decades_ through known effective policies like carbon markets, see subfields that research environmental economics and public economics).
Now, economics can also help understand why we see little meaningful action. Rational people (defined as being able to make comparisons between options presented to them, which simplifies analysis without much loss of generality to cases like bounded rationality) do not choose what is best for a collective (personal happiness/utility) nor what is best for them tomorrow (time inconsistency of preferences) when neither of those have meaningful impact to them today or in the near term. You see this all the time in the startup world and in the corporate world among VCs and executives who are only in things to accomplish short term goals. Self-organizing collective action is _hard_ to generate or maintain without enforcement of some kind.
To explain with a workhorse model regarding collective versus individual action, you can reference the stag hunt game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt. In short, while two individuals engaging for collective action will benefit more in total, there may be incentives to deviate from a collective strategy. People want more _now_, not 75 years from now (beyond the lifetime of the current living).
So TL;DR:
1. Preferences! Or, rather, subjective valuations of research topics by people can vary without applying presentism to near history
2. Because economics can explain failures in collective action, but it doesn't control or recommend against collective action goals. In fact, qualitative economic approaches to policy are often highly successful. So the gap on meaningful action is more related to political will and the incentive to deviate or adopt a policy that isn't Pareto improving.
We pay money to use other people's time, and we sell our time to get paychecks.
Remember the old saying: Time is money.
In short, we pay people both for their time, purchasing of objects, and for use of their assets (without commenting how how fair or unfair their capital acquisition practice was to this point).
If these other things still require time as an input to create them, isn't it still just time at the end of the day?
In the end all the ways Bitcoiners thought the system would come after them never happened. Ironically they got exactly what they wished for and what critics thought could never happen. Because the establishment has a much easier way to suffocate emerging uprisings: Buying off the leaders and incorporating the movement into the mainstream. Crypto has gotten assimilated.
But nice try to lower your buy in price.. ;)
Broadly speaking, you can’t live on crypto alone. Most people aren’t able to buy food and shelter with it.
So the goal, in those majority of cases, is to buy in low for the exact purpose of waiting for a “greater fool” to purchase it from you for more.
> So the goal, in those majority of cases, is to buy in low for the exact purpose of waiting for a “greater fool” to purchase it from you for more.
Feel free to substitute with your preferred non-monetary asset.
I can take dividends (in dollars) from certain stocks.
But not crypto (or non dividend stocks)
I’d argue that stocks without dividends are also a greater fool’s game.
But back to the original point, so you agree that crypto is a greater fools game, financially.
You can earn your money on crypto, get a debit card, and pay for your food and rent with it.
I've done it.
You need an offramp.
The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your crypto.
They would be the “greater fool” in this case.
Even if you earn crypto, that crypto came from a “lesser fool.”
You’re just the intermediary.
On a kind unrelated note, are there any compelling dapps on eth that aren’t financial tools?
When I was playing around with web3 and dapps in 2020 it seemed like the only dapps around were banking protocols and gambling.
> You need an offramp.
> The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your stocks.
> They would be the “greater fool” in this case.
> Even if you earn stocks, that stock came from a “lesser fool.”
> You’re just the intermediary.
So dividends, buybacks, and takeovers don't exist?
> The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your fiat.
> They would be the “greater fool” in this case.
> Even if you earn stocks, that stock came from a “lesser fool.”
> You’re just the intermediary.
I can purchase food and shelter directly with fiat. (There may be some areas where crypto can do that too, but it’s far from the norm)
That’s not a merchant “buying” my money with other representations of wealth, that’s me purchasing food and shelter. Framing it like that is a bad faith argument.
And yeah, I’d say stocks without dividends is also a greater fool’s game.
If someone will take Pokemon cards for a pizza, or a house, whatever, then it has some utility. If someone collects pokemon cards, and has enough for a house, they might (probably) need to exchange them for some real currency to complete that transaction. But pokemon cards are not inherently a scam.. just because the price can go up and down.. they are probably considered a collectable.
Now cryptocurrencies are not collectibles, and they are not currencies, but they have attributes of both I'd propose. They are entirely speculatory in nature, but can sometimes be used as a currency. So, in some ways, I argue, they should be treated like pokemon cards, in other ways, regarding regulation, they might need to be considered a currency to be able to regulate the industry in such a way that protects investors, just like private transactions (selling collectibles) and financial investing (trading stocks/etc) have regulations.
Although this is nuanced, and cryptocurrency is not currency or a collectible entirely, it is not inherently a 'greaters fools game' any more than trading stocks or Pokemon cards.
It's just another thing that needs to be regulated, and if people didn't use it for something, it would just go away, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
OP said it’s inherently not, which is what I was arguing against.
100%, this is politics now, when you see people online with a certain perspective, you tend to at least consider it. This is the psychology of influence on the net, everyone's brains are connected to this same network, and business and government know it. If they can even suggest that individuals give any credence to a random post online, they will make that post, and to their ends. So now, we have entire buildings of people filling the net with their 'opinions', in the name of influencing.
There are so many 'people' online that totally call cryptocurrency an inherit scam (which is pretty much impossible, inherently so, that the idea is itself a scam, and not just able to be used to scam.. cmon, the distinction is there), that I'm convinced that many of the anticrypto posts are simple persuasion,because either the riches want to buy in, or they are scared of what it can do (as far as replacing the status quo).
Now I'm sure I'm that crazy internet crypto dude all of a sudden, but listen closely, cause we will all see in the next decade or two, and neither you nor me know the future. Remember me either way. :)
I'm sure your being vacecious, but there are those that would comment that seriously.
But that's not really the point. You seem to think that I can't really exist and any "person" with such an "opinion" is a part of a propaganda operation or trying somehow to artificially lower the price (with a post!) to buy in.
Can you accept that real people think crypto is a scam?
I said "There are so many 'people' online", implying that there is a lot of propaganda being passed off as opinion. How much? How real? Well, I was giving my opinion on that.
I'm not saying that YOU are this propaganda, but challenging you to defend your point helps to fight, and weed out, the propaganda I'm talking about. Sounds like you might have read it?
Many things can be used as a vehicle to scam to varying degrees, to say that cryptocurrency is inherently a scam in and of itself, is not accurate, as it certainly has non-scam use cases, just like non-cryptocurrencies.
I'm happy to debate, but I don't think either of us are wrong so far, as what you said and what I said are both not mutually exclusive. But if you are asserting that cryptocurrency is in and of itself a scam, I'm happy to have a healthy debate.
I’m sure a fair amount of them get screwed over by bad actors.
But it’s undeniable that the most successful strategy (at least in terms of gaining popularity) is making a pyramid scheme, but automated.
That may say something more about humans than crypto, but it is what it is.
Also, I like how you trim your front sail (cut if your jib), we should be friends.
Edit: autocorrect
If you disagree, comment!! Let's discuss!
I guess I apologize for the little joke at the end if that's the problem.. sorry everyone!
Also, sorry for my opinion! Darn, it does just happen to be contrary to some of y'all's, I'll be more careful!!