Regarding Prollyferation: Followup to "People Keep Inventing Prolly Trees"
dolthub.com
dolthub.com
I made the short bibliography of the original bitcoin paper because of Merkle trees. Damn, I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.
A pure mathematician far from CS, I nevertheless wondered about digital timestamps, and convinced myself they were impossible. Then I went to a talk by Stuart Haber, supported by a paper with funny quotes starting each section. He explained the purpose of an observer to make timestamps work, but they were using a linear linked list.
As a coauthor of the original Macaulay computer algebra system, with some low-level coding chops, it was obvious to me a tree would help here. And there had just been a NYTimes story about how the nascent internet was accelerating research in CS, people would be on vacation for a week and miss entire start-to-finish events.
I stayed up to dawn writing a polite parody of their paper, introducing the use of a tree, emailed it to everyone I recalled had been at the talk, and went to sleep. That's all I ever contributed; I ended up on the joint paper even though my contribution turned out to be a "Merkle tree".
These are not mutually exclusive statements. Actually, this is how Ponzi schemes work ; -)
(Somehow I never connected Bayer et al. and Bayer & Diaconis. Wow!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
Pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, MLMs, NFTs, Crypto, Memecoins... they're all greater fool scams. All based around playing "hot potato" with investments, where early adopters push the potato on later & greater fools.
Memecoins are the most fascinating type of it because with other schemes, there's usually some veneer of legitimacy (i.e. you gotta actually try to scam somebody). I imagine at this point everybody involved with memecoins understands they're scam, and they're essentially just gambling instead of getting scammed. Although, effectively, gambling is its own type of scam.
Many people "investing" in crypto don't understand that stocks/shares give you have extra value because they pay dividends and give you voting rights for the direction a company takes.
I was not wrong...