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That's because these things elicit an emotional response, and people all react differently. Also, describing emotions is difficult.

When I see an instance of good problem solving, I feel a rush of happiness. It sometimes makes me want to physically get up from my desk and cheer as if I was watching a sports event. All I can think of is "this code/solution is fucking awesome".

Meh, big tech are private corporations. That's what they've been doing for thousands of years.

If you care about censorship-resistance, support decentralized projects.

Compared to the shit sysadmins normally have to deal with, setting up nodes and spinning up custom nets is a breeze in recent years.

Petnames try to solve a trilemma known as Zooko's triangle.

A naming system that is both permissionless and globally unique will tend towards unreadable names. You'll see lots of Sybil attacks on these systems, with botnets squatting any decent name.

For DNS, you have many governance bodies that act as gatekeepers for domain registration. Repository hosts like GitHub avoid Zooko's triangle by having namespaces, and an appeal process if someone is squatting your trademark. Crates.io on Rust doesn't allow automated crate creation.

In many cases, naming systems are not permissionless, and gatekept by a central entity. Once you open the floodgates of permissionless-ness, you're dealing with a hostile environment that's difficult to control.

Petnames are one solution to this issue. Others are Handshake, Namecoin and ENS

What you said makes a lot of sense. Also quite a few times I come to the conclusion that there's no satisfying answer to a topic, and that's fine.

Just this time around I had a weird gut feeling. So I created this post to get a bit of meta-level feedback.

I'm not always expecting a consensus, it's just that frustration-fuelled rants end up being noisy and sometimes difficult to differentiate from rational arguments.

What also bothers me is the hostility and cynicism with which these things are discussed.

Also, you're tripping if you don't think HN has a quasi-consensus on many, many topics.

If you mention that companies can have HA requirements you get hit back with "most companies don't actually run a cost-benefit analysis for the complexity of introducing X 9s of uptime" or "most outages happen due to misconfigurations and human error, so your redundant architecture won't save you"

I guess that plays a part

> the beacon chain network wouldn't function properly if it had too many nodes

The fact that a decentralized P2P blockchain can have "too many nodes" is such a massive failure of engineering. It's honestly mind-blowing.

Is there a word for this type of business model? Offering a service for free until they become the de-facto standard, and then start squeezing people?

Your reasoning makes absolutely no sense. Either you have the budget for luxury, or you don't.

If you have the budget to eat at the airport, drink cocktails and pay for early boarding, then you're most likely loaded.

If you're not rich, but still pay for convenience services like that, I'd say you have irrational spending behavior.

Imagine having "spare" 50€.

Unless you're absolutely rich, you probably shouldn't default to using a cab in a city known for it's amazing public transport.

I like my company and I think the logo looks cool. Simple as that.

But according to you I have an unhealthy identity problem or longing for validation if I wear a t-shirt?

The advice "you don't need scalable architecture" comes from the same place as "performance isn't important, code is all about readability and maintainability"

It's just insecurity and pure coping. They're not dealing with complex performance bottlenecks, so they say these efforts are wasted.

> If you want to communicate a way this technology is useful then just do it and make me care

I purposely didn't, because then I'm committed to defending dozens of attacks. I already do a lot to educate people on DLTs on several platforms. I'm not gonna turn HN discussions into my full-time job.

If you don't like it, you can fuck off.

Post your real name and address here, let's see how little you care about privacy.

That's probably the dumbest statement I've read on HN, by far. You're just projecting your apathy.

You telling me people don't care about democracy? Or privacy? Or the environment?

Wait until your country gets hit with hyperinflation, or you live in a dictatorship and your entire livelihood is taken from you.

You'll start caring about ideologies very quickly.

What does "practical advantage" mean?

Crypto is a fundamental societal shift. It's not a convenience app like Uber or PayPal, it's a redesigned version of our global financial ecosystem. It puts control into the hands of people, can help prevent corruption, and gets rid of bloated banks that are a drain on our society.

For the record, I have met with bank directors, managers for portfolios and asset management, etc.

These people are probably the most condescending, obnoxious, ignorant douchebags that I have ever met in my entire life. My confidence in DeFi shot up tenfold after meeting these people

As long as you are consistent in your decision making, I have no problem with that outcome.

I'd rather have it that people are by default skeptical and do their own research. Crypto will win by default because of its merit.

If I was wrong they could just give me a sound argument instead of directing insults at me and throwing "witty" reductionist jabs.

Do you think that argument structure is sound? By that logic quantum computing is a scam, because quantum theory has existed for a century.

> until you described paxos and raft as untested

I said unrelated, not untested. Raft is not an adversarial protocol, it doesn't share the same threat model as blockchains.

They fulfil entirely different purposes.

That's what technical crypto skeptics always do, it's one of the most common reductionist comments you can find on technical forums:

- Blockchain is just an inefficient linked list/database

- Merkle Trees have existed since the 70s

- Distributed systems have existed since the 80s

- ZK proofs have existed since the 80s

Completely disregarding any advances in cryptography or consensus. Usually they throw in a reference to some other unrelated consensus algorithm like Paxos or Raft to seem smart.

And if you attempt to highlight some advances in the DLT space, you will be accused of "spouting buzzwords". There's literally no way to communicate with a person who has already decided they don't care.

Warren Buffet very likely doesn't understand the technology behind DeFi or decentralized governance. He's also heavily invested in the legacy financial system.

So he'd be the last person I'd trust with advice on cryptocurrencies lol.

How does Mandarin compare on that scale

Dude, operating system is one of the most fundamental things to consider when getting a dev machine.

MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the Linux kernel.

Warmongering imperialist country leverages military power to exploit the rest of the world = honorable peace bringer.

Get out with your American exceptionalism.

Your thinking is human hubris in full force.

Humans ability of conceptual modeling is entirely constrained by their perception. Humans can't conceptualize a tesseract. All of their conceptualizations are in some form related to their perception.

When you're thinking of a pen, are you thinking of the atoms, molecule compositions and all the quantum effects going on? No. Your mind is, just like ML, working from a template constrained by your perception (visual, haptic, auditory).

Humans are more advanced than ML, but they are nothing special.

First of all, I'm neither invested in ChainLink nor ETH. I'm interested in working on oracles.

Secondly, this is an informal discussion on a mainstream forum - one which is pretty strongly against crypto. So forgive me for not being super keen on writing PhD-level responses

The current white paper mentions that for a briber with at most `$d*(n^2 + n)/2`, where n is the number of oracle nodes, there exists a subgame perfect equilibrium for bribers to not issue the bribe and nodes to behave honestly. I can't seem to find a formal proof though.

If you bother to check the listed examples in the white paper, my hand-wavey "trillions of dollars" estimate wouldn't be even that far off, assuming wider adoption of Chainlink.

Dude, defrauding Chainlink even once would probably cost you trillions of dollars - if not more. Have you read the super-linear staking section in the white paper?