cinquemb

s/crypto/neg eps, never made a profit publicly listed, need a bailout every 10 years, stocks/g

> flying object with perfectly controlled laser launched from a trebuchet

Is what I considered to be ambiguous because it wasn't clear to me that you were assuming the system would be either 'laser launched' or 'launched by a from a trebuchet' with the laser part only applying to the object, regardless of your mention of:

> The laser in the study is moving with the projectile,

Your comments after that made it clear that we are both on the same page regarding the laser part is referring to the payload.

The difficulty being your point is not that interesting to me when i made the post, but the possibility of being able to send something into LEO while minimizing drag effects on the payload to something negligible along the flight path of the payload.

The $2000 came from the cost of the trebuchet system, I'm more interested in at what price point would a system be possible (Ideally below the cost of hypersonic missiles [0] now that I assume use something like this) with a rail gun kind of system.

[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3142581/chin...

> so I guess even for $2000 you won’t be able to have a 30 km altitude,

Does seem like it references some difficultly-ness

> flying object with perfectly controlled laser launched from a trebuchet

Does seem like it 'assumes otherwise' to (or its at least ambiguous to me and would be less so if there was a perhaps some separation between the laser and launched, but maybe that's a bit nit picky)

> The laser in the study is moving with the projectile,

And would be even more difficult than such (at least going by how much energy would be required).

But regardless, I'm not sure that 30 km altitude and first achieving mach 5 is a major constraint beyond that is probably not achievable at the $2000 price point (or its not clear to me that it is from the paper) and would be something that could be worked around with more iterations of what level of ionization of surrounding air around a projectile with a given density would give the desired amount of drag reduction (perhaps zeptosecond[0] pulses would work even better than femtosecond ones that were compared against nanosecond, or achieve similar results with lower mach number and higher density of air being ionized around the payload).

[0] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...

I never said how easy it would be only that there is a difference between a payload that is launched via a laser and a payload that has laser capabilities in it (yes, 'moving with the projectile', like i was talking about from the beginning where you assumed otherwise).

But for one, the energy source would have to be on board the payload to power the laser (localized around the payload), and for the other (that I was not talking about) the laser is not on the payload and as the payload travels further away from the launch site, you would use an non linear increasing amount of energy and follow the path of the payload (ionizing air not only around the payload continuously but along the path where the payload no longer is, which would require more energy than needed).

I'm talking about a projectile that has the laser capabilities in itself (i.e the electromagnetic slug is emitting the femtosecond laser pulses after it is launched), not launched via a laser (it could be launched however, but I was assuming later on the comment that both the rail gun and the slug itself will need to be charged up).

I wonder if you could do something like this[0] on the projectile to reduce drag:

"It is reported that femtosecond-duration laser pulse can be deployed to reduce drag for blunt-body vehicle in high-Mach flow field of air by generating laser plasma and shockwave. The interaction of plasma shockwave induced by femtosecond-duration laser pulse and bow shock over the head of the blunt-body vehicle is investigated numerically in the flow field of 30 km apart from the surface of the earth at Mach number of 5 and the mechanism of deploying the femtosecond laser plasma to reduce the drag of the vehicle is analyzed. The Navier-Stokes equations are exploited to compute the drag reduction for different femtosecond laser energies. The present numerical experiment proves that the femtosecond laser pulse has a better drag reduction effect than the nanosecond laser pulse under the same condition. When the femtosecond laser energy is 0.06 mJ, the femtosecond laser plasma can reduce the drag by 98%. And the higher the energy of femtosecond laser pulse, the higher the drag reduction ratio and the longer the time of low drag. Deploying three femtosecond laser energy point to reduce the drag of hypersonic vehicle is much more obviously. This energy-deposition mode can improve the optimum drag reduction ratio and save the laser energy."

Probably out of the scope for a $200 build, but maybe in the scope of a $2000, $20000, or $200000 build?

I also wonder if iterating on the above, combined with a concentrated solar power plant of arbitrary sized solar field that could provide enough energy for a railgun to launch payload with femtosecond laser plasma capabilities out of earths gravity well?

Maybe, we could escape from the Goddard age eventually lol

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282709902_Exploring...

I'm not sure how far policy makers expect to get when the corner stone of public policy everywhere seems (to me at least) to hinge on forcing individuals to try in some particular way that they may not be willing to allocate resources (i.e time, money, labor, knowledge, skills, etc) for weak incentives in return.

> I don't consider it a fork unless it includes the state.

I think id agree for things like ZCash/Dash etc compared to BTC, but I'm not sure I'd agree when it comes to the all contracts deployed on all EVM networks and none of this has anything to do with decentralized stablecoins.

For example, you can mint MIM (a decentralized stablecoin) on both avalanche c-chain and ethereum (as well as polygon, fantom, bsc and arbitrum), and they are both worth $1, but have different collateral backing it on both networks. If users wanted to leave one or the other, they could just redeem their mim for the underlying, sell it and buy the collateral on another network and mint it on the other network. The collateral might trade lower on one network based on market factors (like if the narrative shifted to that the chain became too centralized or w/e, and this assumes that even the price movement of the underlying overwhelms the over collateralization ratio, it might not) but it would just mean that there would be more or less mim on that particular network as assets are liquidated and not that the MIM itself would be worth less.

If you are forking the chain state and not just the vm, that could be the case.

However, if you are only forking the vm and allowing for people de deploy other protocols (or forks of other protocols), this is not the case (they just start off at lower total supply relative to the native collateral available on that network from a lower demand base).

Just because you may not be willing to swap cash/gold/anything a local counter party values in whatever jurisdiction you reside in for a random networks gas and/or tokens that trade on them, doesn't mean others cannot.

If you want to use coinbase to buy crypto and tokens, that's on you.

You can fork decentralized over (crypto) collateralized stablecoins even if you can't force a fork of a centralized stablecoin operated by incorporated entity to be recognized by them.

Unless we're going to pretend that there is only one way on and off networks and only in one currency denomination…

> These are not mutually exclusive.

Didn't say they were.

> I just want to find high-quality projects

Of course everyone does, but one won't be able to tell the difference at first, and so its best to jump in on any project related to a particular field of interest, start discussing/asking questions with people in those communities (without trying to allocate any of your financial capital), start analyzing the contracts code, and you'll slowly find out about more projects/ideas/concepts.

> It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo.

Well, what the status quo is isn't really important in the exploratory stages, because no matter where you land, people may have different opinions on what that even is and it will be up to you to determine what's the best course of action for yourself.

> So, from those examples it looks like the real advantage of the DeFi is that is a greenfield implementation by a small team, as opposed to depending on the existing burocratic and slow banking organizations. Would you agree with that?

Partly (and not really limited to a small team, any one can join a community and contribute to a protocol or build upon it with a protocol of their own with the public abi's of the contracts), but another part missing here is that the financial system as centralized as it is, is still pretty fractured and opaque with various hidden ledgers, hidden risk management systems and hidden counter parties all over the place who don't necessarily trust one another and one doesn't really have any way to get any insight to what risk looks like overall between them (and partly because the entities want to capture the value by being in between the users) from the perspective of the public.

> regulators off your back and banks to cooperate,

It's more than about just regulators, its about users having a say over how every actor can engage with a system. If one address starts making transactions that abuse its position with a protocol (via governance or excessive risk taking within the protocol), users can fork the code, make needed changes to mitigate against such, and withdraw their capital from one protocol and use another easily with the new changes. The users themselves can capture the value while also using the system.

> what would you choose? Centralized or blockchain based?

With permissionless DLTs, you can see credit build up in real time with all counter parties involved with a protocol in a way you cannot with the existing financial system without the need for regulations, that __may__ serve, at best in the short/medium and long term interest of users/counterparties (most of the time, regulations end up really only enabling incumbents to come up with better ways to hide how risk builds up while stifling other competitors out of the market, even if initially they end up making things transparent for some aspects of the financial system). And because of the lack of trust upfront, most user will not want to use a protocol that does not open source/verify its contracts on chain.

With centralized systems in jurisdictions with lesser regulations (i.e caymans, bahamas, etc), the opposite is the case where you have even more opacity into operations and very little incentive to be open about it with ones users or counter parties (think something like FRAX/DAI/FEI [where one can see collateralization in real time on chain with the various assets and the leverage] vs USDT/USDC [one has to trust them at their word or spend resources threatening legal action that may at best on show a snapshot of what constitutes is collateral at any given time, and they have no incentive to share their code for how the manage their operations and risk]).

In a perfect world, where everyone could trust each other (and the banks) to be open and honest all the time with their dealings while allowing for some semblance of psuedoanonymity for those who want it, allow potentially anyone to use such even if some individuals may not like another for whatever reasons that have nothing to do with the system of transaction themselves, write code and systems that are interoperable and easy to build on by others, I would prefer centralized. But that world is a pipe dream.

> How to DeFi?

Well, there isn't any particular way, I just started looking at traditional startups on angel list that were making/doing things related to crypto, then quickly became interested in decentralized uncollateralized algorithmic stablecoins and started contributing with pull requests and community discussions. From there I just followed my own interests.

> What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers?

You'd cant go wrong familiarizing yourself with things like decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending (that run the gambit from over collateralized to uncollateralized) protocols, stable coins of various designs (decentralized or not) and concepts like staking, yield farming, liquidity pools, oracles, flash loans. With those terms, should be enough for you to DYOR and see if anything interests you to dig deeper (its ok if non of it does).

> How do you follow the meta?

I don't. I narrow in on the topics that most interest me from my experience working in tradfi and look for analogues in defi, I look for ways defi can make the barriers to do such things accessible to people that don't work on bank desks.

>It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy.

Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way.

One may never be convinced if they are ok with centralized/federated alternatives at their disposal, esp since "actually interesting dApp projects" is subjective, and that is perfectly ok in my mind.

When I had a conversation with someone who traded lehman positions out of administration profitably years after its collapse and the issues that preceded that with JPMs centralized collateral management procedures and their interest in various decentralized analogues in DeFi that could replace it, its good that they are not looking to seek to convince you.

When I had a conversation with someone who traded interest rate derivatives for a big bank for 13 years and their take on how DEX liquidity pools could be a serious contender for ways how people from tradfi can hedge various forms of risk on chain (esp when those markets break down in various places around the world for various reasons [not limited to regulatory reasons incentivizing breakdowns of a particular market]), its good that they are not looking to convince you.

When I did some work for a nigerian fintech that was able to bypass a lot of crappy local/cross boarder payments infrastructure by leveraging crypto markets in order to help provide access to financing/liquidity and settlement infrastructure for local commodities traders and producers to the global market for their goods, its good that they are not looking to convince you.

The great thing about DAGs/blockchains/DLTs is that people don't have to use them for things if they don't want (provided that they have access to centralized/federated alternatives, and actually trust that their incentives are aligned with their own). I don't have to give a shit about random POAPs or NFTs while being able to still use various chains at the same time as others who are only interested in various chains for doing stuff with POAPs or NFTs who dont give a shit about disintermediaton of various things that go overlooked, even by central bankers (especially if they have been relegated to footnotes in various publicly accessable reports that often go unread by the public at large), in tradfi.

I think because of the nature of cryptocurrency, even in a few of the DAO's im apart of, a lot of this POAP/NFT "silly" stuff gets mixed into pool with talking about return skew of underlying token trading on a dex and its effects on efficient tail risk mitigation when determining how to construct a collateralizaion contract tailored for it "serious" stuff that and passive observers just all this stuff in the same bucket (modulo centralized companies making centralized protocols trying to pitch their shitcoins[POAPS|NFTS|ERC20s] to community calls of decentralized and permissionless protocols/communities as if they are worth something).

And to me its seems the antidote in part is hyper decentralized, cross nation state jurisdictional distributed, and transparent structures of power and wealth that seeks to cannibalize and eventually obsolete the existing financial system.

Only on a few servers in the world where I can see users speaking mandarin, english, farsi, turkish, etc where their wealth goes up as their leaders in their respective countries increase their malfeasance…

Seems like a matter of perspective or belief, no? For the observer of death it seems permanent; whereas a corpse lacks the same ability to perceive their own death the same way as the observer after it happened (i.e. a few moments, modulo anyone's beliefs surrounding after-life) if going by measuring brain activity via something like EEG and blood flow through the body.

Where as "trapped in that system" could be as long as a few decades before one eventually dies.

Castles of glass and convinced they are made from stone…

So people who make less than ~$2/day are supposed to now save up (and spend less on food/water/etc) for these "so affordable" panels? And even if they could, how are you going to get those panels (or parts replacements for these "so affordable" systems when they will degrade and break down) to these places that have bad or no roads at scale and struggle to get __anything__ to their regions? And completely eschew local mines and resources that are easier to access with less (upfront) capital? Nuts.

I worked remotely for a nigerian fintech that had to do intergrations between the big banks in western africa (and crypto markets) and farmers trying to sell their crops and they pretty much had to get access to capital (which is hard for most people not already intimately connected to wealth/power) to fund __infrastructure__, even before doing anything else (market places local producers/traders getting access global commodity markets via crypto). Even the big banks in nigeria don't even want to fund infrastructure stuff…

Same is true for many places i've visited within Indonesia (been living thru ME to east asia since 2016), its crazy to see local news about new airport being built in an area with pretty much nothing there for most people who are quick to overlook these types of things because they take it for granted in their everyday life.

I'd like to see the Cop26 president go to rural EM's and personally tell the people, where few to none (state run) corps are really looking to build out any infra for anything, green or not, that they cant use things like coal…

Might as well write the eulogy now…

LCOE for CPVCSP + molten salt storage systems are already cheaper than nuclear according to lazards (and increasingly more so with every new plant online), but probably not acceptable for anywhere above the latitude of northern Germany.

The EU would need about 10k Cerro Dominador's (which would cover about 1% of the surface area of the EU) to supply its energy needs at worst case (using ~1kwh/m2/day seen during dec/jan).

DeFi and free and open source clients that users can modify/compile at will for whatever platform they are on, solves this.

Really cannot trust centralized entities with the incentives in place now.

I think at scale, the method used in Chile with the Cerro Dominador[0] using CPVCSP could be adopted. Their system was about $1B for 210MW and has ~17.5 hours of storage.

So ~$4.76B for 1GW or ~$4.76T for 1000GW.

This also ignores future upgrades with would use sCO2 turbines vs typical steam and higher delta_C molten salts (typical delta_C now is only 300 for KNO3 + NaNO2 + NaNO3, but systems using CaCl2 + MgCl2 would have a delta_C of ~1500, and meta-material salts could be engineered with even higher delta_C) so the same solar fields can have even higher outputs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Dominador_Solar_Thermal_...

Could work for alot of computational-x fields.

Historically, i tried to get software dev jobs that maximized my free time to do whatever i what on the side (also helped that i've been working remotely for ~6 years).

One seriously expects an industry with captured and revolving door of regulators from big banks will make it easy (not to mention so far up the assess of politicians around the world)?

Creating a centralized corporate entity and centralized operating protocols is like painting a huge target on your back that screams: "Here big banks and captured gov, come screw me and all the users over please!"

No need to be strictly anon, just don't play the same game… if you really want to build, what you build needs to be "metadata drone strike" proof…

I moved to and have been living in an EM country for ~6 years and tell my wife (whose from the EM country) something like this occasionally: "If the leaders want to adapt "green" policies uber alles, they'll be hanged in the street with their friends and families faster than takes for their doomsday predictions to come into fruition than the current status quo of slow progress. If they really want people to adapt "better" solutions, they would need to make them cheaper and more accessible than what exists today".

I'd argue the same is true for even DM countries who have populations that have grown to expect even more…

> This sounds like credit, but not credit origination. If new units of the numeraire are created, that is origination akin to a bank loan.

New units of stablecoins are being created out of thin air, but the catch is that they can only be used on the exchange (technically, it could be spent else where if other contracts wanted to use it), and if there is a shortage of actual stablecoins when someone tries to withdraw their credit balance, they will receive debt tokens that are redeemable from the exchange for stablecoins at an interest (collateral requirements will be raised for all actors if credit balance > stablecoin balance, and lowered when the opposite is the case).

> What do you mean by 'borrow collateral into existence'?

In this case, in order for the credit balance for an address to increase typically, a user will need to deposit stablecoins into the exchange and their credit balance gets incremented by the same amount (their credit balance is used to buy derivatives).

However, in the case where a liquidity pool is borrowing from the exchange, the credit balance is increased for the liquidity pool without stablecoins being deposited by the pool (typically a pool will need to have stablecoins deposited into it by liquidity providers in order for the credit balance of the pool to increase, the credit balance of the pool is used as collateral write/buy derivatives).

> A non-bank does not have the ability to create bank loans.

A decentralized derivatives protocol can lend its credit balance (and fractions of its stablecoin balance, if it exists at all at the point when a position is opened) to a decentralized liquidity pool when there is demand by end users to open a position (ex. a user can deposit frax to buy options/forwards/interest rate swaps/etc against a liquidity pool while the exchange allows the pool to borrow collateral into existence [and destroyed when the users position is closed, modulo the type of derivative the user bought]) without the liquidity pool providing all or any the collateral to back the position if it ends up moving against the liquidity pools exposure.

Such a protocol can also issue debt against their stablecoin flows in accordance the protocol code, that can also float on a dex at a premium or a discount and also be used as collateral in other decentralized stable coins that allow for differing collateral underlying (like some decentralized credit/debt backed stablecoins out there now, or allow themselves to be collateralized by any combination of ERC20 underlying).

> How does this interact with the concept of algorithmic stablecoins? Not every stablecoin is simply backed by deposits.

Relegated to a footnote (just like Jeffery Snider at Alhambra Partners talks a lot of the typical chatter by frbny et al wrt the (euro)dollar system gets relegated to footnotes and nick named the phenomena "footnote dollars") on page 4:

"Stablecoins that are purportedly convertible for an underlying fiat currency are distinct from a smaller subset of stablecoin arrangements that use other means to attempt to stabilize the price of the instrument (sometimes referred to as “synthetic” or “algorithmic” stablecoins) or are convertible for other assets. Because of their more widespread adoption, this discussion focuses on stablecoins that are convertible for fiat currency."

i.e we'll pretend that people cant swap dollar denominated non centralized corporate issued stablecoins for any kind of fiat at the floating rate of the denomination of the stablecoins underlying to the fiat in typical fx markets (also ignoring that higher amount of those other stable coins are being used in defi protocols relative to their supply than the centralized ones).

So of course, those like FEI, FRAX and others will get ignored.