301 karma · joined September 9, 2021
I think they have cash issues. Can’t get more uses due to lack of gpu, and current users are costing too much.
People say “bubble” with their mind so focused on what they think is dumb ways of spending money, and they miss the lasting cultural impact, which is actually what matters.
I’m not a fan of the apes(there’s more interesting tighter communities in the nft space), but I see more and more ape-branded stuff appearing here in China. That’s probably not making the nft holders any direct money as they’re unlikely to be paying for taking the images, but these waves are unpredictable.
Mona Lisa wasn’t that famous till it was stolen…
People often only remember the first bit…
—— “ On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other”
People act like this is the end of Dahls legacy, yet his stories have probably been discussed more in the past 24 hours than the past few years combined.
I recommend the book Graveyard clay on the death on languages, and how the dead are still as chatty as the living- in many ways the dead are harder to silence.
TikTok/Douyin is just as cringe over here in China too.
In the past the ethereum foundation has made their own wallets/browsers/clients but they’d rather focus energy in other places and instead have grants and donations to others to help them get started and to operate their own companies.
The reason is to break away from being an authority, over time the EF should become less powerful. They are making decisions to reduce their importance and the reliance the ecosystem has on one group. Ethereum users were never ethereum foundation users.
The other listed organisations and their clients are all excellent. This is a much more healthy approach.
Privacy is not a crime, it’s a human right! Sorry that it makes the polices job harder, but our rights are more important.
And didn’t we go through all this already in the 90s? Are we now gonna start arresting all cryptographers?
This is because they don’t like money that is independent from state control. They hate the idea of bitcoin and eth not being $ or €. The large majority of money laundering happens through banks, who just pay a fine and sweep it under the rug.
It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people in the world who aren’t any of the above and are also benefiting from our attempts to design systems that respect liberty.
I think we absolutely should build infrastructure that allows people within oppressive regimes options with which they can resist, escape, coordinate. For example, we shouldn’t accept that Iranian devs get booted off GitHub.
Hacker.
The defining thing of hackers is taking things apart, understanding them, modifying, breaking, rebuilding, improving, dreaming!
What a sad ideology of “don’t touch, leave it to the authorities”
At this point I’d like to sees US regulation around $ stablecoins so we can use something else and reduce the power of the US dollar in the world. Go ahead America, regulate yourselves.
But ultimately succeeding in making something that can live in the sometimes hostile environment on chain means you make something that can last and is reliable. There can be awkward UX issues with that though.
Relying on stable gas fees won’t work because the network has to have a priority list when it’s busy, so those willing to pay more will be prioritised and you’ll be stuck. If you want to inherit the properties of the chain that are why you would build on it in the first place then you have to work to those constraints.
It’s the same problem across all decentralised protocols, if it’s cheap to say something you get spam(see email) but introducing costs can just skew it to those who can afford to spam instead (essentially those with an advertising budget).
So there’s been a lot of research on proof of personhood (BrightID/ideas/proofofhumanity) to add Sybil resistance mechanisms so we can do 1p1v across the network. They’re working ok, but the next big step is adding zkproofs so we can anonymise the voting (which is needed to prevent collusion) which clrfund and sismo are working on.
Kleros have an interesting curated register protocol, which seems to work on small scales. Some groups are using it to token rank guy issues to prioritise work and get feedback.
The status blog has some interesting writing around these ideas over the past few years https://status.im/research/
So for metamask they would replace the calls to infura with a light client instead. Easy. They’re probably a year away from adoption, this year will accelerate development as it’s something lots of us want.
I think a key idea to pursue is how we could provide privacy for individuals and transparency for institutions/corporations.
And I think it’s important to try ideas. Try something, anything. Accept that most things will fail, that 90% will be shit. Break things, take things apart and rebuild them, remake old ideas anew. Take the same energy i have to getting mods to run in a game, or monitoring the rain in my garden and doing it to money and banking and lending, community currencies, universal basic income, trust networks, etc.
That’s not to say don’t be critical, there is a lot to question and weird speculation(imo a result of the abusive financial system we live in, it didn’t just appear with crypto) but hackernews could do with more hacker mentality on crypto imo. It’s a massive design space for people to try out their ideas for money and debt and gift giving and public services and taxes and where digital worlds and communities meet real world politics and institutions and economies.
I’d like it if my bank was hentai death metal themed not hsbc blandness. And that I can build my own savings account logic on top of it that automatically sends half the profit to animal charities. I’d like to be able to spin up an instant bank account for my new guild of strangers around the world at the click of a button so we can share materials and grow together. I’d like my money to be pictures of dogs not pictures of a president or queen. I don’t think these ideas are silly, dangerous, or impractical. And it doesn’t require the permissions of tradfi. Just public and private keys. Wild.
A lot of people I know working in crypto saw their families hurt badly by that crises and will happily spend their lives trying to build something else (even if the odds are stacked against them). They protested at OWS and saw little political will for change.
Eventually we are left with the question: Do we just sit around voting every few years for another colour to be in charge, or do we try build something else, maybe it’ll work, maybe not, failure is ok we already live in a failed state, maybe all we need to do is threaten the existing political/financial institutions so that they do things differently or risk irrelevance. Who know. Trends and forces.
For comparison that one year is about the same as the entire history of ethereum, which gets a lot of criticism. Or about 4 world cups.
And a crazy 10x that on the high end of the estimates. Be interesting to see some new numbers on this.
So there would be very little reason to duplicate a chain for that. You can already get the free stuff and you can’t copy the rest because clubs will look at their register not yours.
The reason is companies were abusing self employment laws by only recruiting freelancers even for full time roles so they didn’t have to provide sick pay/parental leave/holidays/pensions/etc.