everfree

Both your sources show that only 30-35% of nodes run on AWS. They seem to support my point that Ethereum would continue running during an AWS outage, not your point that Ethereum runs "solely" on AWS.

Furthermore, the cointelegraph article misquotes a Messari report as if it's discussing the current state of Ethereum as having central points of failure, when it's really discussing a hypothetical upgrade to Ethereum that was never considered nor built.

Finally, node percentages don't actually matter in terms of chain uptime. What really matters are staking validator percentages, since they are what determine chain building and finality.

Okay, then it should be just as fair for everyone to ignore your claim that Ethereum runs "solely on AWS".

You're free to hold whatever opinions you want, but I don't see how they're relevant to this conversation.

It's not productive to spread falsehoods about how blockchains are hosted.

Do you think it would continue or not? Your comments seem to hold conflicting points.

Ethereum running “solely” on AWS is a myth. If AWS were shut down, the chain would continue as usual.

After reading the lawsuit more closely, it seems like they’re arguing that Apple rejects applications that include cryptocurrency features but weren’t submitted by regulated financial institutions.

One of their examples was a social network app that was rejected for including a crypto tipping feature.

From the article:

> They argued that a peer-to-peer app based on "decentralized" crypto technology "would allow iPhone users to send payments to each other without any intermediary at all."

Kraken lets you access crypto that is held in custody by an exchange company. Ledger Live lets you access crypto that resides on a separate physical device.

To the best of my reading, plaintiffs argue that Apple is preventing people from holding cryptocurrency on their iPhone. As in, the private keys are stored in the app's secure storage space, so the crypto is actually "in" the phone and not with a company or on a separate device. So to answer your question, that's what it seems plaintiffs are alleging that Apple prevents people from doing.

Yes, Archive blocks Cloudflare DNS. People say it’s intentional, but whether that’s true isn’t clear to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

It's also a label that means nothing in practice, just like "uses ai".

AI is already considerably more knowledgeable and easier to communicate with than the customer service representatives I interact with day to day. Interacting with an API through ChatGPT, I would have a lot more faith that my inquiry would be solved given the tools available at that customer service tier.

It's only been three years since AI Dungeon opened my mind to how powerful generative AI could be, and GPT-4 blows that out of the water. Whatever gets released three more years from now will likely blow GPT-4 out of the water.

AI is already considerably smarter than the dumbest humans, in terms of its ability to hold a conversation in natural language and make arguments based on fact. It's only a matter of time before it's smarter than the average human, and at the current pace, that time will arrive within the next decade.

All useful technology improves over time, and I see no reason to believe AI will be any different.

I don't really know what you're arguing against. Are you arguing that cryptocoin users don't form communities?

New models of computation are a given, and improved application-specific circuits for the most widely-used models are also a given (I believe current models run mostly on enterprise GPUs). Together these could easily make AI models 100x more efficient even without any advancements in the underlying chipmaking processes.

> I also believe there will always be a need for determinism. There will absolutely be applications where the randomness of ai is unacceptable.

For high-assurance apps, I agree there will always be a need, sure. Of course, these high-assurance apps will be supervised by AI that can inspect it and raise alarm bells if anything unexpected happens.

For consumer apps though, an app might actually feel less "random" to the user if there's an AI that can intuit exactly what they are trying to accomplish when they perform certain actions in the app (much like a friendly tech-savvy teacher sitting down with you to help you accomplish something in the app).

People said that about virtualized code, but then computers got 100x faster and now we're running 10 megabyte web apps in a 500 megabyte client to display a simple page of text, and it still loads acceptably fast.

The AI algos will get 100x faster through a combination of hardware and software optimizations. Then, deterministic vs AI will mean the unnoticeable difference between displaying some info to the user in 0.001s vs 0.1s. Then, AI will become the default.

OCR is a technology. Users of a particular OCR software form a community.

Cryptocoins are a technology. Users of a particular cryptocoin protocol form a community.

That sounds somewhat similar to the Chrome team's Web Environment Integrity proposal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999

Third party site asks user's browser to request an image from the author. User requests an image from the author. Author says "sure thing", distributes an image of goatse to the user.

In the USA at least, it's not legal for a passenger of a plane to use cell radios at all. That's apart from the signal being blocked by the plane's metal hull unless perhaps you're holding your device up to a window.

So at least for now, you're stuck with their overpriced wifi.

https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/163104

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/22.925

I'm tired of the propaganda on both sides, honestly. I don't really care what non-technical people think about a piece of software that they don't understand.

If its purpose isn’t to advise people not to invest, then what’s the purpose of it?

> He argues that even if the technical problems were solved, the social and economic changes promised by cryptocurrency are undesirable.

I didn’t realize his argument is merely that crypto will change the world in an undesirable way. I thought he was arguing that crypto will be ineffective at changing it at all. That makes his argument much easier to address.

Investing isn’t about judging a technology as good or bad, it’s about judging it as profitable or unprofitable. If he’s not arguing that the line won’t go up, then his argument is frankly irrelevant to me as an investor.

I empathize with people who believe crypto will have an overall negative effect on the world, but it’s not like it will go away if investors refuse to buy units of it. And if crypto does cause real, lasting social and economic changes over the coming decades, I personally doubt that a layman video journalist will be the one to accurately predict the nature of that transformation. The most accurate prediction is probably going to come from someone much more versed in macroeconomics and/or the tech itself. Probably from someone who understands how proof of stake works.

> people in a conspiracy theory don't really _read_ your post, so much as flag it as non-conforming then dunk on it.

It goes both ways - people flag legitimate claims of conspiracy and dunk on them, too. For example in the 40s, the idea that cigarette manufacturers were conspiring with the medical industry. Or as a 2010s example, that the NSA is secretly recording everything we are doing and saying online (PRISM).

My biggest take-away is that you need to be paying attention, you need to get your news from multiple sources, and it helps to have strong foundational knowledge that you can use to gauge the reliability of those sources. Usually the establishment is right, but sometimes that random guy on the internet is right, so it's important not to discredit anyone solely based on their pedigree. A process that, obviously, the kool-aid drinkers in that subreddit didn't seem to have a grasp on.

> the highest btc transaction-fees are public record and have (very rarely) ranged into the 10s of thousands of dollars

That's not representative of the market rate, so is irrelevant to the discussion of whether fees are cost prohibitive.

For example at the same moment in time as the guy who accidentally paid a $500,000 fee (in the same block), you can see a bunch of transactions that went through with $2 and $3 fees. Yes that's still high in a relative sense, but it's not tens of thousands of dollars.

To determine whether corn is cost-prohibitive, you need to go by the market rate, not link to a top-10 list of the most overpriced corn purchases ever made.

Like I said I'm not planning to go back and re-watch the entire video to make a list (I'd be writing an entire essay), but here's one illustrative example I noted the first time I watched it:

"[Proof of Stake] suffers from delays when elected validators are offline and the system needs to draw again."

It's easy to look at a poorly designed Proof Of Stake protocol and point out flaws. But since his beef is with PoS itself, I think it's fair to measure his claim up against Ethereum's beacon chain which is considered to be one of the better PoS designs:

* Ethereum's validators are self-chosen, not elected.

* There is a ~99.5% participation rate, meaning that 1 in 200 slots are missed. Offline validators are very, very rare.

* When this 1 in 200 chance occurs and a slot is missed, Ethereum's elastic block size mechanism (EIP-1559) ensures that the chain catches up by effectively adding additional capacity to the subsequent blocks.

* Whereas this slight unpredictability happens very rarely in Proof Of Stake, it happens constantly under Proof Of Work. This is because PoW is an inherently unpredictable poisson process. Thus, PoS is a substantial improvement over PoW in this way.

* The result of this 1 in 200 fluke is that your transaction takes 18 seconds instead of 6 seconds to reach preliminary finality. And that's only for Layer 1 transactions which are by their nature high-value; Layer 2 transactions enjoy quicker and more predictable soft finality.

I also remember there being issues in his economic analysis of PoS, an unwillingness to engage with scaling technologies (hand-waving it away as based on nothing), no mention of for example Secret Shared Validators or Rocket Pool as solutions to the solo staking minimum, no mention of the history or state expiry roadmaps when discussing the growing size of the chain. Those are just some more examples, reconstructed from some old notes of mine I found, without me spending too much more time on this.

Bitcoin network fees have never been $54,000, let alone $3.6 million. The most they've ever been is two, maybe three figures. You must be reading the chart wrong.

It's not just you. I'm not about to go rewatch that video to pick out the inaccuracies again because it's such a long video, but he definitely could have benefited from running his script by a software developer for fact-checking.

So far, crypto has gone through multiple market cycles lasting about four years each. At the peak people get euphoric and think it will solve all the world's problems, then in the trough people think it's all on its way out - that it will slowly fade out of public consciousness until it's forgotten. I believe the reality is somewhere in between.

But one thing is for sure: during the trough of every cycle, there's always someone posting that they wonder if crypto is dead and never coming back.

I still don’t see what that has to do with the ability of an Argentinian resident to hold and transact in US dollars.

What centralized US-dollar-denominated ledger does an Argentinian citizen have access to?

Technically speaking, it's a JavaScript library used for interacting with EVM blockchains.

Practically speaking, people use the term to mean just about whatever they want nowadays. Often it's used as a generic buzzword to sell products on some vague idea of a better, more equitable internet.

> Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead.

Duplicates don't sell. This is very similar in crypto - if you duplicate an existing blockchain, its block space doesn't sell. Art - and blockchains - sell because they are original, liquid, come with durable social proof, and have resale prospects and/or utility (real or perceived).

> Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.

I think I get what you're saying - if a blockchain were able to run on a single computer, then gas would be very cheap because each calculation would only need to be run once.

Current blockchain protocols, of course, do not work like that. So if I might try to paraphrase your argument about overhead, it boils down to "if blockchains did not work the way they do, then gas costs would be cheaper." Which I can't really argue with.