martin_vejmelka

PGP/GPG provides primitives for managing some sort of PKI but beyond that, I don't follow your argument.

For the sake of concreteness, here's for example how an auction can run on the blockchain:

At time T an asset A owned by an anonymous seller is locked into a smart contract for H hours at minimum price M. Participants are free to enter their bids until time T+H. At the end of the period, the smart contracts examines all bids - if all bids are less than M, no-one gets asset A and ONLY then is asset A released back to original seller. If at least one bid is above M, the highest bid is picked and the asset is automatically transferred to the bidder's address. Everyone else is re-funded automatically. The seller is the only one able to extract the cash from the contract.

Anyone can check the contract code and ascertain:

- the seller can't withdraw their asset and run away with it before auction ends

- the seller cannot reject a valid bid (>M) if the auction is already started

- everyone but the winner will be re-funded their money back

- winner (if any) is the only one who can retrieve the asset after auction is over

... and any other interesting properties. Regardless of whether Alice is from Argentina or from Zimbabwe.

How would you do this on top of PGP/GPG?

Note that source code bugs and hacks happen and are part of the process of working out how to do this stuff safely. There's a recent example of someone messing up a contract and $36M is stuck* forever because the refund functionality had a bug.

Blockchains provide computational integrity across geographic regions and jurisdictions requiring no trusted intermediary. You can run a computation and guarantee that others running that computation are using the same inputs and will get the same result.

Even if Russia or France decide that they no longer allow Ethereum (just an example), this does not affect computations anywhere else.

This is a massive shift in power balance toward participants. No other computational platform before the blockchain has provided all these features at the same time.

Just pointing out that those are most likely just the days the files were saved. There could still be some unlucky souls that ran computations for several days/weeks that happened to terminate on those days (and store the results). Those people could lose significantly more than a day and a half. On the flip side, HP jobs tend to be frequently checkpointed unless the storage cost is prohibitive for the type of job.

https://flexa.network uses crypto in interesting ways for risk transfer and is practically no-fuss for merchants in the sense of complying with regulatory requirements. 1% fees flat.

Awesome tip, thanks for that!

The repo, where I'm adding them is here:

https://github.com/vejmelkam/covid19-models

I appreciate any additions on top of the (little) that's there. Especially anything not in English, which is harder to find.

> why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?

Most publishers prevented you from doing this as of a few years ago (I left academic research around that time). You were not allowed to post any content that contains any work by the publisher (even formatting/editing changes after first round of reviews). Thus you could only publish a "preprint" which no-one can rely on to cite because they don't know what's in the final peer-reviewed version. Some publishers are more lenient than others but there's definitely friction induced.